Posted on 12/31/2007 5:34:36 AM PST by RDTF
Sometime within the next six months or so, al-Qaida or Saddamist terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive.
No, Middle Eastern mass murderers don't celebrate the Vietnamese festival of Tet, but trust that America's enemies everywhere do celebrate and systematically seek to emulate the strategic political effects North Vietnam's 1968 attack obtained.
This spring marks the 40th anniversary of Hanoi's offensive (yes, 40 years, two generations). It will also mark the umpteenth time American enemies have attempted to win in the psychological and political clash of an American election what they cannot win on the battlefield.
In the course of Tet 1968, North Vietnamese, American and South Vietnamese forces all suffered tactical defeat and achieved tactical victories; that's usually the case in every military campaign. At the operational level, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) suffered a terrible defeat. As NVA regiments emerged from jungle-covered enclaves and massed for attack, they exposed themselves to the firepower of U.S. aircraft and artillery. The NVA units temporarily seized many cities at the cost of extremely heavy casualties.
However, Tet achieved the grand political ends North Vietnam sought. Tet was a strategic psychological attack launched in a presidential election year during a primary season featuring media-savvy "peace" candidates. "Peace" in this context must be italicized with determined irony; in the historical lens it requires an insistent blindness steeled by Stalinist mendacity to confuse the results of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (e.g., Cambodia's genocide) with any honest interpretation of peace.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Will Walter Cronkite come out of retirement to declare victory for the terrorists?
I don’t think al Qaida has anywhere near the manpower that the Viet Minh had to launch their offensive.
It didn’t take a Viet Minh “manpower” for 9/11 to occur. Terrorist sleeper cells can have the same psychological effect.
Waow, I haven't seen intellectual honesty in a newspaper like this in a coon's age.
Is that counting or not counting the media support?
The question is “Will the media stage a Tet offensive?” I suspect they will.
How about New Year's Eve?
Dude, this is a family show.
So we’d kill app. 35,000 terrorists and convince them that they cannot win? That’s great, now that Cronkite is known for the communist he was and is. We now have alternative media that has as much an audience as the MSM to refute the declarations of doom from Cronkite’s commie cockroach spawn.
and don't forget FreeRepublic!!
Yup.
Or try harder than ever to talk the economy into a recession.
Or both.
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Camp/7624/Generals/giap.htm
whoops, sorry if i stepped otl ... just an inanane attempt at holiday humor
Except for the four or five weeks following 9/11, these two entities (really they're one and the same idealogically speaking) have been beating the drumbeat of defeat in the War on Terror.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel the threat is very real and dangerous, but I think they also have come to fear the response by our side to any sort of homeland offensive.
In fact, I suspect if Bin Laden is still alive he spends his time in his hideout lamenting the success of 9/11. Oh, he talks a big game, but he has to know deep down in this heart of hearts that they were much better off before 9/11 when most Americans didn’t see them for what they are. They were completely off the radar screen until 9/11, one of the reasons why it was so successful.
My guess is the cells spend their time living a comfortable life at someone else’s expense and talking about ‘that day’ when they will attack the satan that is the US. All the while hoping and praying the orders never come!
Completely inappropriate. Thanks for posting it. ;)
My guess is the cells spend their time living a comfortable life at someone else’s expense and talking about ‘that day’ when they will attack the satan that is the US. All the while hoping and praying the orders never come!
I am more confident though that their leadership realizes there are plenty of fish to fry around the world in furthering their cause and they really don’t gain anything by poking us in the eye here in our homeland.
Every day, week, month, year that goes without a significant attack against us here at home more Americans drift back to sleep.
Remember, one of the would-be 9/11 attackers backed out before the operation, walked into an FBI office and spilled the beans about the whole plan. His intelligence never went any farther than that office. Had it been passed up the ladder there’s a chance it would have gotten attached of the seemingly unrelated intelligence about people taking flying lessons all over the US but not wanting to learn how to take off or land, just navigate.
Thanks,
I really needed that reminder.
The ballless bastards of the msm made sure that the US would withdraw from vietnam and the demonRATs left our allies without funds so that they would be slaughtered in record numbers.
Just demonRATs being demonRATs.
They’ll need nukes or some heavy duty bio/chem weapons.
Worse, they will take out thousands of their fellow muzzies, and earn the permanent enmity of the people they say they want to free.
I think this is wishful thinking by the boomers running the Chronicle, and a hope shared by journalists the world over.
Of course they will, just like the Gore Offensive and then the Kerry Offensive. Fortunately, we fought back and won.
LOL, I love that quote.
I agree with you completely.
Wars are fought on both strategic and psychological battlefields, and I believe the latter has been secured for our side. Notice that in Iraq, the number of suicide attacks dwindled while the number of remote detonations increased, an indication that the Arab Street had begun to see Iraq as a lost cause some time ago. The attack in Pakistan on Bhutto is instructive. It appears as if the jihad has to sit back and decide how to do the most damage with ONE suicide bomber, because willing martyrs are difficult to find now.
There has been no attack on US soil for five years now, not because we have somehow interdicted the enemy's capabilities, but because the last attack ended up blowing up in their face; there is a lack of will to strike now in the enemy camp, IMHO, because of the consequences since 9-11 that have accrued to the entire Middle East.
We should be vigilant, as you say, but this war will not end with any formal treaty or surrender, we must thus recognize what we are doing right. I see no Tet, I'm watching now for signs that our enemy is capitulating.
Good one!
And if Walter Cronkite and his fellow news mongers had acted like loyal Americans at that point, the communists would never have taken South Vietnam.
“The purpose of the (Tet) operations, which were unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity, was to strike military and civilian command and control centers throughout the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and to spark a general uprising among the population that would then topple the Saigon government, thus ending the war in a single blow.”
The only two places where there is any chance of a Muslim popular uprising are in the tiny enclaves of Pakistan where they already rule. Such uprisings would be against the central government and the military and are already happening to some extent.
The other place would be Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood might attempt another coup against the government.
However, if you lose the Tet analogy, there are still many major attacks al-Qaeda could carry out. But they would be self limiting.
Their biggest chance for success are with bombings. Even a small functional terrorist cell could on its own carry out a large single, or multiple bombings. Bombings also have the least risk among terrorist actions.
Second are targeted assassinations of leaders. Again, this limits the exposure of the organization to just the assassin and his handler.
Third is industrial sabotage resulting in disaster. This is very effective, but less appealing to terrorists unless an explosion is involved. Technical expertise is required, but may not have to be in the same country.
But none of this is likely to cause a popular uprising, the changing of a government, or even the loss of command and control.
OBL is dead. Confirmed by Bhutto in an interview with David Frost.
Such attacks are relatively easy to coordinate and pull off.
On the other hand they want a Dem for President so they may well hold off until after the elections. Why waste assets when the citizens are doing the job for you?
Wasn't it a proud day in US history when the hostages were taken and the peanut man did nothing for 400 days? Instead of carpet bombing the bastids, we get dead Delta forces burning in the desert? Maybe Murtha could get Sec of Defense.
With all due respect, I've tried many times to track this down with factual certainty, but to no avail.
Giap has written many books (aka, tracts), but I've yet to find this "autobiography". No one telling the above story has ever included the actual title of the book where the assertion is made. The assertion is never put forward in actual quotations from the "autobiography", but as a summary of his comments.
The best I've ever found is that the story actually comes from Col. Bui Tinh, a top officer from the NVA who is actually much more colorful than Giap. Long-expatriated to France, he is said to have told the story in question while being interviewed on French radio or TV. Col. Bui DOES have an autobiography of sorts, but the story isn't there either (I've read the book).
Not trying to dispute the story itself, but to get the facts of the attribution. There's nothing factual tying this statement to Giap, more pointing to Bui, but (so far as I've found) nothing that proves it with 100 percent certainty. It's a bit of an urban myth.
I have bookmarked a site that tracks the American casualties in Iraq on a month to month basis and separates deaths from hostile and non-hostile causes.
This is a very informative site! I have watched its reports for over two years now. The figures for December ‘07 are wonderful! Granted, the death of even a single fighting person is too much and to be greatly mourned, the total for Dec. has been 21, or an average of .71 per day. This daily average compares to 4.23 per day in May of ‘07. It’s the first time it’s ever been less than one a day. Of the 21, eight were listed as non-hostile!
My Mom used to say “Nothing succeeds like success!” and I believe that’s going to be doubly true in Iraq. These people have NEVER had the opportunity for anything that approaches a normal like as we know it. The more they settle down and get to know life as it should be the less inclined I think they will be to turn back the progress. It’s like the old western movies where the town had been run by the bad guy so long that no one remembered what life was like before that. Then one good guy rides in, helps kick out the bad guy and then the town is ready to stand on its own again. Iraq is much more complicated than that, but the principle is the same.
God bless America and our fighting men and women!
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/11/interviews/giap/
In the book that I read, Gen. Giap was much more definite about the role of the American MSM than he is in this piece. I will continue to search.
On the outside chance that he isn’t dead I would hasten to point that he’s so restricted in his activities that he’s practically useless to them.
Hunter's comments needs a small correction.
:)
The comments at the Chronicle remind me of the Paulers and the Dems. “They did - whatever - because we did something in the past.”
History tells us we made mistakes in VN, and one of the biggest was leaving the way we did. I remember the aftermath, to. The news of the atrocities committed in the vacuum we left trickled into our public consciousness over the years - when it became advantageous to the media.
It’s a new world, with a new media and a new means of communicating. And a completely different kind of threat - one which doesn’t merely want to conquer, but to convert.
I don’t believe that the Americans that I know will lose our will to fight, no matter how provoked.
To give up to the current threat means that I lose the benefits of personhood and go into a burka and/or that you and I will probably be the first to die for our activities on boards like these. For some reason, the Paulers and the Left (including the feminists, the gays and the abortionists) think they’ll be spared.
Even if we drew back within our borders as the Paulers and the Dems say they want, the terrorists would continue - since most of the time they blow each other up over how many and which sons-in-law of Muhammed to follow.
And, just as the Chronicle commenter blames what happened in 1968 on what happened in 1956 and the Paulers, Sheehans and Kos’s blame 9/11 on our involvement in Saudi Arabia or Israel, the men who blow themselves up to kill others think they’re doing it for what happened in the past - not the present.
We can’t erase that past. We can only look at it in light of what *is* in the present and pray to Heaven that we have the wisdom to elect the right leaders for the future.
If it is retail, then they are idiots, and they won’t have the desired effect.
If they are going to attack, they should attack the food supply. THAT will shut us down, but good.
Who goes to the mall? You could shut down the malls around here and nothing really bad would happen in the long term, thanks to the internet. Every retail organization worth its salt has a bricks and clicks strategy anyway. Aside from it being a natural response to an emerging technological trend, it’s a fantastic business continuation strategy, not that businesses are developing those strategies with reckless abandon.
Start bombing, or permanently disabling through some poisoning strategy, major grocery distribution and sub-distribution points and you will knock the USA down for the count in under a month.
None of the retail outlets have storage capacity past three business days, and that’s being kind. They rely on JIT distribution (Just In Time) to ensure the shelves get stocked. Non-essentials are stocked by the manufacturers themselves.
If the major grocery retail chains haven’t been dialed into the disaster planning process at this late date, then its evidence prima facia that the Fed/State folks need to fire everyone and start over with Former Marine generals.
I’m already convinced that the single biggest negative economic effect on our economy has been Congress.
1. Ethanol legislation causes corn/wheat prices to double inside of 6 months.
2. Immigration policy - keeps the price of some products artificially low. Cost of infrastructure impact of illegals paid in deficit financing and increased property/sales taxes at city/state level. 20% of prison population currently attributed to illegals. They’re also judgement-proof, which means that making victims whole comes out of premium-payers pockets.
3. Mortgage mess - could have headed that one off at the pass by ensuring that the bonds were properly graded by the quality of loans. Housing prices have doubled, and so have defaults. Discretionary spending in the last four years due partially to the mortgage-backed equity loan spending at the consumer level.
We need a new inflation indicator called the Middle Class Inflation Index.
It’s a simple of staple goods that are tracked for price that shows the actual impact of idiotic legislation at the Fed/State level:
1 gallon of gas
1 gallon of milk
2 loaves of bread
1 jar of peanut butter
1 dozen eggs
1 lbs of butter
1 package of spaghetti
2 jars of spaghetti sauce
1 bunch of bananas
3 lbs of apples
1 oil change
1 year of car insurance
1 month of phone service
1 years worth of electricity
Add them all up and then track it on a graph over time. The damage that Congress has done this session is going to be permanent, since there are so many things mitigated against deflation. Everything in the economy opposes it, and when the price of things get stretched as they have, they fall, to be sure, but there’s hysteresis, and prices won’t naturally fall back in line with ‘actual’ pre-speculation values.
It’s worse this time since consumers have backed the debt with their houses. There is even MORE disincentive for the price of housing to decline, but it has to.
This interview will explain exactly what the purpose of the Tet Offensive was for:
How North Vietnam Won The War The Wall Street Journal, Thursday August 3, 1995
What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar movement? What was the purpose of the Tet Offensive? How could the U.S. have been more successful in fighting the Vietnam War? Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism.
Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”
Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits?
A: Keenly.
Q: Why?
A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.
Q: How could the Americans have won the war?
A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland’s requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.
Q: Anything else?
A: Train South Vietnam’s generals. The junior South Vietnamese officers were good, competent and courageous, but the commanding general officers were inept.
Q: Did Hanoi expect that the National Liberation Front would win power in South Vietnam?
A: No. Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory. Regular military divisions with artillery and armor would be needed. The Chinese believed in fighting only with guerrillas, but we had a different approach. The Chinese were reluctant to help us. Soviet aid made the war possible. Le Duan [secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party] once told Mao Tse-tung that if you help us, we are sure to win; if you don’t, we will still win, but we will have to sacrifice one or two million more soldiers to do so.
Q: Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?
A: No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party, only one army in the war to liberate the South and unify the nation. At all times there was only one party commissar in command of the South.
Q: Why was the Ho Chi Minh trail so important?
A: It was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort, involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units.
Q: What of American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail?
A: Not very effective. Our operations were never compromised by attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage, but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out the bottom. Bombing by smaller planes rarely hit significant targets.
Q: What of American bombing of North Vietnam?
A: If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson and it didn’t worry us. We had plenty of times to prepare alternative routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people for months if a harvest were damaged. The Soviets bought rice from Thailand for us.
Q: What was the purpose of the 1968 Tet Offensive?
A: To relieve the pressure Gen. Westmoreland was putting on us in late 1966 and 1967 and to weaken American resolve during a presidential election year.
Q: What about Gen. Westmoreland’s strategy and tactics caused you concern?
A: Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam. He also worried that Westmoreland might receive permission to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
In January 1967, after discussions with Le Duan, Thanh proposed the Tet Offensive. Thanh was the senior member of the Politburo in South Vietnam. He supervised the entire war effort. Thanh’s struggle philosophy was that “America is wealthy but not resolute,” and “squeeze tight to the American chest and attack.” He was invited up to Hanoi for further discussions. He went on commercial flights with a false passport from Cambodia to Hong Kong and then to Hanoi. Only in July was his plan adopted by the leadership. Then Johnson had rejected Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more troops. We realized that America had made its maximum military commitment to the war. Vietnam was not sufficiently important for the United States to call up its reserves. We had stretched American power to a breaking point. When more frustration set in, all the Americans could do would be to withdraw; they had no more troops to send over.
Tet was designed to influence American public opinion. We would attack poorly defended parts of South Vietnam cities during a holiday and a truce when few South Vietnamese troops would be on duty. Before the main attack, we would entice American units to advance close to the borders, away from the cities. By attacking all South Vietnam’s major cities, we would spread out our forces and neutralize the impact of American firepower. Attacking on a broad front, we would lose some battles but win others. We used local forces nearby each target to frustrate discovery of our plans. Small teams, like the one which attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, would be sufficient. It was a guerrilla strategy of hit-and-run raids.
Q: What about the results?
A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was.
Q: What of Nixon?
A: Well, when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate we knew we would win. Pham Van Dong [prime minister of North Vietnam] said of Gerald Ford, the new president, “he’s the weakest president in U.S. history; the people didn’t elect him; even if you gave him candy, he doesn’t dare to intervene in Vietnam again.” We tested Ford’s resolve by attacking Phuoc Long in January 1975. When Ford kept American B-52’s in their hangers, our leadership decided on a big offensive against South Vietnam.
Q: What else?
A: We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1123293/posts
Also see:
http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp
It is my opinion that our Troops won this war. It is the people who stayed home who lost the war. We lost our resolve and tied the hands of our politicians. If we would have kept our resolve and let the politicians make the decisions necessary to win, it would have been over sooner with less men paying the price.
We must not allow this to happen again. We must stand behind our Troops and their leaders. We must allow our leaders to do what is necessary to win the war. We must not allow the commie traitors to steal our resolve away again. I say we must stand a post for our Troops and this can be done in March in Washington DC.
God bless our Troops and their commanders.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1942839/posts
If the terrorist did attempt a Tet offensive you can be sure the media will misinform us as they did during the Vietnam Tet offensive. You can also be assured there will be weak minded Americans who will love to hear it.
Also see this Netlore site :
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_general_giap.htm
RELEVANT EXCERPT :
Vietnam War historian: Giap made no such statement
According to Clemson University history professor Edwin Moise, General Giap never wrote or stated any such thing. From Moise’s comprehensive Vietnam War Bibliography (emphasis added):
Supposedly, General Giap had written in How We Won the War that in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leaders in Vietnam had been ready to abandon the war, but that a broadcast by Walter Cronkite, declaring the Tet Offensive a Communist victory, persuaded them to change their minds and fight on. This rumor was entirely false. Giap had not mentioned Cronkite, and had not said the Communists had ever considered giving up on the war.
Several variants of this rumor appeared in 2004. In these, Giap is supposed to have credited either the American anti-war movement in general, or John Kerry’s organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) in particular, for persuading the Communist leaders to change their minds and not give up on the war. Giap is sometimes said to have made this statement in How We Won the War, sometimes in an unnamed 1985 memoir. All versions of the rumor are false. Neither in How We Won the War, nor in any other book (the 1985 memoir is entirely imaginary), has Giap mentioned Kerry or Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or said that the Communist leaders had ever considered giving up on the war.
In his own words
The most relevant statement I could find that is actually attributable to General Giap was uttered in a 1989 interview with Morley Safer, as excerpted in The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations by Howard Langer (Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 318):
” We paid a high price [during the Ted offensive] but so did you [Americans]... not only in lives and materiel.... Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. ... The most important result of the Ted offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory.... “
The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.
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