The media is widely reporting Bush's "admission" that what is occurring in Iraq is may be analogous to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
In an interview with Bush, ABC's George Stephanopoulos brought up Friedman's column and quoted White House press secretary Tony Snow as saying that the comparison might be valid.
Bush answered: "He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."
The difference, as I see it, is that the North Vietnamese Army did not intend to lose that engagement, they expected to win. And when they got soundly defeated, they thought the war was over and they had lost. In the mind of the North, the Tet Offensive was a last ditch effort to save themselves because there was a growing number of leaders in North Vietnam who were ready to pack it in and attempt settlement negotiations with the South. When it was over, AVRN thought it was over as well. After all, the Communist losses were huge: 45,000 enemy soldiers were killed and another 6,000 captured.
Militarily they were done.
But, the American media and Communist driven anti-war movement helped them snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. And much to the surprise in the North, they found that they had won a now famous psychological (aka media and political) victory that ultimately turned into a real victory.
In contrast, Islamists in Iraq do not have the hope nor the expectation of military victory in Iraq. They have not assembled a large force with which to perpetrate an assault like what was undertaken in Vietnam. They likely don't even have 54,000 men under arms to be killed or captured. And they are not organizing a force to directly challenge Coalition troops as happened during Tet; they kill by truck bomb and IED which while psychologically significant is not militarily significant. The Tet Offensive was militarily significant.
But the Islamists have learned the lesson of Tet and are attempting to skip the part where they lose a lot of people and going right for the gold: a media and political victory
The only thing that stands in their way is the politics. If November comes and anti-war politicians are swept into office, and Gulliver is tied down with the ropes of endless subpoenas and congressional investigations and a hasty withdrawal from the battlefield results, then they will have proved that you don't even need to lose a giant urban battle and sacrifice thousands of soldier to win.
You just have to make it look bloody for the cameras while expending but a few suicide bombers.
In both cases, Tet and now, it was an election year. And the Islamists tried this very same thing two years ago. Writing a few months before the Presidential Elections Walter Shapiro wrote of the similarities to what was going on in Iraq then, the Tet Offensive, and the US elections
...there was a potent connection between impressions of American vulnerability fostered by the Tet offensive and President Johnson's forced withdrawal in March from the 1968 presidential race.
History is not destiny, and it is premature to suggest that Iraq will cost George W. Bush a second term. But recent poll numbers certainly have not produced rapturous "Mission Accomplished" celebrations at Bush-Cheney headquarters.
A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll, conducted before Monday's transfer of power in Baghdad, found that 54% of those surveyed now call the decision to send troops to Iraq a "mistake." And a new CBS News/New York Times Poll, which also pre-dates the hand-over, revealed that only 36% approve of the way that Bush "is handling Iraq."
As we know, it didn't work out for the Islamists in 2004.
But they keep trying.
And what keeps them going is the very fact that both the Media, and those politicians opposed to the war, use rhetoric and selective imagery to help make the case for them. All they need do is keep providing the blood.
US Media will, at the drop of a hat show US soldiers being killed by Islamists but are squeamish about showing Nick Berg's beheading.
Islamists repeat the talking points of the political Left who attempt to codify into law measures that would handicap our efforts to win. There is no such effort on the part of the enemy: They will use every trick, below or above board, to defeat us.
The fact is, the Islamists have learned from history and they have a media strategy. Everything that discourages us from keeping up the fight they want exaggerated and any successes we have, or failures they suffer, are to be downplayed.
Sounds like our media is on the same page.
