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Breaking the negotiated annual truce, for surprise, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars launched the Tet Offensive, in the night of 30/31 January 1968, named for the Vietnamese lunar new year. This campaign continued in various forms through September of that year, ending in total military defeat, for the aggressors. And a brilliant propaganda victory, for the same. Thinking back on the Vietnam War this last week. And while I was doing so, a young leftist friend wrote to me, on an entirely unrelated topic, taunting with a remark about 2008 being, "The last year of the American Empire" --...

Last year, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, wrote to the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, telling him to "be ready starting now" for America to run from Iraq, reminding him how America cut and ran from Vietnam and the "aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam, and how they ran and left their agents." Alas, Zarqawi never got to implement his Iraq takeover plan because the same troops that are allegedly losing the war right now killed him in June. But al Qaeda in America isn't ready to quit, yet! New York Times...

How did we go from winning the war in Iraq to losing overnight? Was this decided by the same committee that changed "Peking" to "Beijing"? These word changes are a fortiori evidence that liberals are part of a conspiracy. On what date did "horrible" and "actress" vanish from the English language to be replaced with "horrific" and "actor"? Who decided that? (Meanwhile, I'm still writing "Puff Daddy" in my nightly dream journal when everybody else has started calling him "Diddy.") When did "B.C." (before Christ) and "A.D." (anno Domini, "in the year of the Lord") get replaced with "BCE" (before...

They headed off to college as the Berlin Wall was coming down, were inspired by globalization and came of age with international terrorism. Freed from a constant nuclear standoff as a dominant fact of international life, members of Generation X no longer fear war or upheaval in the global status quo. Understand them -- and where they came from -- and suddenly President Bush's Middle East forays, grand democratic experiments and go-it-alone strategies take on a different look. That's because nearly a dozen thirtysomething aides, breastfed on "Sesame Street" and babysat by "The Brady Bunch," are now shaping those strategies...

Comparisons to the Vietnam War have been hovering over the conflict in Iraq since day one. The anti-war movement apparently decided that the war in Iraq would be a “quagmire” before it even began and naturally, they hearkened back to the glory days of Vietnam for inspiration.  The truth is, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was a great victory for the anti-war movement. They were able to undermine a war in which America never lost a major battle simply by sapping the nation’s will to fight.  In 1968, when former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite surveyed the carnage after the...

Despite America's triumph in Desert Storm and Tommy Frank's brilliant run up to Baghdad, the Vietnam Syndrome is with us yet. We never really purged it from our system. That is the meaning of 40 Senate votes on a resolution demanding that President Bush give quarterly progress reports and a timetable for getting us out of Iraq. While 58 senators voted no on timetables, they bought into the rest of the resolution. And what is the message? We are not going deeper into Iraq, as McCain urges. We are not going to stay the course, as Bush insists. America is...

QUIT. It's that simple. There are plenty of more complex ways to lose a war, but none as reliable as just giving up. Increasingly, quitting looks like the new American Way of War. No matter how great your team, you can't win the game if you walk off the field at half-time. That's precisely what the Democratic Party wants America to do in Iraq. Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions: The Dems are looking to throw the game just to embarrass the Bush administration.

The American left may like to reprise Vietnam, but they're badly wrong, writes Michael Gawenda. THE New York Times columnist Frank Rich is the voice of America's late middle-aged baby boomers for whom opposition to the Vietnam War became the prism through which they would subsequently judge US foreign policy. Rich, who was once the most feared theatre critic in America when he was initially on the Times, able to close a Broadway show with a lukewarm review, is now back at the paper writing a weekly column that has become a rallying call for opponents of the war in...

In the late-1970s, the belief grew within democratic societies that they could not defeat authoritarian enemies because the very things that went with democracy and made it so appealing — openness, debate, freedom of speech and press, etc. placed them at a disadvantage. Many had come to feel that we were losing the "long, twilight struggle" known as the Cold War because Vietnam had demonstrated our inability to present a united front against our enemies. What happened in Southeast Asia was thought to be particularly salient because of its chronological proximity — Saigon had fallen just a few years earlier...

Will casualty-aversion cost Bush the election?FOR GEORGE W. BUSH, it would be bizarre if the most loyal and gifted member of his cabinet were to be the instrument of his defeat in November 2004. Recent developments on the Iraq front of the war on terror make such thoughts about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld harder and harder to put aside. No, it isn't about the prison scandal. Bad as this is, a successful execution of the president's Iraq strategy will in the end render Abu Ghraib an ugly sideshow. The danger to the Bush presidency lies in the decision to pull...

Anzac Day is over for another year, but the enthusiasm of the young reflects an on-going generational change, writes Padraic P. McGuinness. The extraordinary degree of public support for the ceremonies and remembrances of Anzac Day is a remarkable and puzzling turnaround from the public mood of a generation ago, when respect for fallen soldiers and for our military generally was at an unprecedented low. When troops came home from Vietnam they were vilified and described by some apparently intelligent people as murderers and probably rapists, and willing servants of villainy. Quite a few, already burdened by the traumas of...