The legacy of Tet

Arthur Herman writes in the Wall Street Journal today a fascinating piece entitled “The Lies of Tet” that rings strangely familiar in relation to the narrative we get from the Democrats and the media in relation to the current war against terror;

…the desperate fury of the communist attacks including on Saigon, where most reporters lived and worked, caught the press by surprise. (Not the military: It had been expecting an attack and had been on full alert since Jan. 24.) It also put many reporters in physical danger for the first time. Braestrup, a former Marine, calculated that only 40 of 354 print and TV journalists covering the war at the time had seen any real fighting. Their own panic deeply colored their reportage, suggesting that the communist assault had flung Vietnam into chaos.

Their editors at home, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, seized on the distorted reporting to discredit the military’s version of events. The Viet Cong insurgency was in its death throes, just as U.S. military officials assured the American people at the time. Yet the press version painted a different picture.

To quote Braestrup, “the media tended to leave the shock and confusion of early February, as then perceived, fixed as the final impression of Tet” and of Vietnam generally. “Drama was perpetuated at the expense of information,” and “the negative trend” of media reporting “added to the distortion of the real situation on the ground in Vietnam.”

The North Vietnamese were delighted. On the heels of their devastating defeat, Hanoi increasingly shifted its propaganda efforts toward the media and the antiwar movement. Causing American (not South Vietnamese) casualties, even at heavy cost, became a battlefield objective in order to reinforce the American media’s narrative of a failing policy in Vietnam.

Yet thanks to the success of Tet, the numbers of Americans dying in Vietnam steadily declined — from almost 15,000 in 1968 to 9,414 in 1969 and 4,221 in 1970 — by which time the Viet Cong had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. One Vietnamese province after another witnessed new peace and stability. By the end of 1969 over 70% of South Vietnam’s population was under government control, compared to 42% at the beginning of 1968. In 1970 and 1971, American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker estimated that 90% of Vietnamese lived in zones under government control.

Yesterday, I’d read one of the bloggers from our side (forgive me for forgetting whom) who’s plunged into the depths of the world of Leftism and read blog entries that called the homicide bombing attacks in the Baghdad pet market last week an indication that all was indeed not well in Iraq. Every death is seized upon as evidence that the Bush Administration and General Petreaus are liars.

In fact you can do a Yahoo News search on “mass+graves” and see every news service seize upon the blood and gore being inflicted on the Iraqis by al Qaeda, but do a search on “Iraq+success” and see what you get. Apparently things that don’t fit the narrative are ignored. When’s the last time you read about an American hero in Iraq or Afgahnistan that wasn’t on a right-wing blog or a milblog?

Democrats are fully invested in our failure and the media is manipulating the market for them.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Historical, Media, Politics, Terror War