Again with the Tet Offensive comparisons to Iraq. Via ABC News:

“President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

Tiger Hawk comments:

“Here’s what Think Progress said he said:

President Bush is right to finally admit that violence in Iraq has reached a tipping point, and that the U.S. is not winning the war as he has claimed.

That is, of course, not what the President said. He merely agreed that there was an appropriate comparison to be made between the Tet offensive and the violence we are seeing in Iraq today. I agree. The question is, what was the lesson of Tet (the all-out offensive of the Viet Cong in early 1968, at the time of the “Tet” new year holiday in Vietnam)? “

For those of us who lived through it, the significance of Tet is purely in the eye of the beholder. At the time the leftist media protrayed with glee how it was a stinging defeat for the United States. My how things never change.

However that is simply revisionist dogma and frankly not true.

President Bush was right, there is a comparison. Not with Iraq vs. Nam on the ground, but in the effect of the antiwar left in this Country had on the populace. If you look at it Bush slamed Stephanopoulos and the rest of the MSM on they’re own lie and motivation for it, but reading their take on wht he said it appears they’re too stupid to catch it.

“”There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

The media then as now looks for any opportunity to distort history to help their co-horts at the polls.

The reason the left loves Tet is that they created it, that is their version of it, and they’ve been using it since the day the Iraq war started. But again, history shows how delusional they are.

Via the Smithsonian:

“Shortly before 3 a.m. on January 31, 1968, a squad of Vietcong guerrillas blasted a hole in the outer wall of the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, gunned down two American military policemen who tried to stop them, and laid siege to the lightly defended headquarters building where the flag of the United States was officially planted in South Vietnam.

As part of a nationwide wave of surprise attacks by the Communists during the Lunar New Year—the Tet holiday—the resulting six-hour battle was militarily inconsequential. In fact, in strictly military terms, the two-month struggle known as the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the attackers. It ended with the expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army and the southern-based insurgent troops, known in the West as Vietcong, from each place they invaded.

In the theater of public opinion in the United States, however, the attacks were a great success for the North Vietnamese. Brought into the living rooms of Americans by new communications satellites over the Pacific, scenes of the carnage, particularly at the embassy, severely damaged national confidence in the war policies of President Lyndon Johnson, who was already under fire from a frustrated citizenry in a presidential election year. The dramatic developments set in train during Tet led eventually to the withdrawal of American forces and the collapse of South Vietnam.

Tet was a historical anomaly: a battlefield defeat that ultimately yielded victory. This remarkable result accounts for Tet’s resonance whenever U.S. military forces meet even temporary reverses. In the 12 months after Baghdad fell in April 2003, for example, more than 200 stories in major English-language newspapers referred to the Tet Offensive. And faced with a flare-up of attacks in Iraq this past June, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer that he had no doubt the insurgents had “read about Tet and the fact that if they make a big enough splash, even though they get a lot of people killed and we pound them, they end up winning psychologically.”

We did not lose the Tet Offensive militarily, but we did lose psychologically, through a dishonest MSM which propagandized for the Cong simply because of their antiwar and anti-american beliefs. At a time when the MSM reigned supreme they misused their responsibility and caused a nation to feel ashamed for being. Yet the fact is that even the enemy realized this.

The following is from another who was in the theater at time they recall an interview with General Staff of the NVA, Bui Tin. What he said could be applied today:

“The Wall Street Journal published an interview with Bui Tin who served on the General Staff of the North Vietnam Army and received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. During the interview Mr. Tin was asked if the American antiwar movement was important to Hanoi’s victory. Mr. Tin responded “It was essential to our strategy”, referring to the war being fought on two fronts, the Vietnam battlefield and back home in America through the antiwar movement on college campuses and in the city streets. He further stated the North Vietnamese leadership listened to the American evening news broadcasts “to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement.” Visits to Hanoi made by persons such as Jane Fonda, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.” Mr. Tin surmised, “America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.” Mr. Tin further advised that General Vo Nguyen Giap (Commanding General of the North Vietnam Army) had advised him the 1968 Tet Offensive had been a defeat.”

Al Qaeda knows it cannot defeat us on the ground but their leaders know the history of the US and how we became demoralized (brainwashed) by the leftist MSM during Nam. They are banking future success that the same will hold sway now.