28 October 2003

The Tet Offensive

The news this morning- and it is still Vicki reading it for a few more days- is about the situation in Iraq. Five bombs at rush hour and forty dead. Almost all of them local citizens. The Press is making the case that this is Vietnam all over again, and this mass attack something like the massive Viet Cong Tet offensive that we won, militarily, and lost in the media.

I have stood on the sidewalk outside the wall that surrounds the former U.S. Embassy in the former Saigon and looked at the memorial to the dead VC who breached the wall in a small tank, and the ones who died on the grounds inside, shot by the Marine Guard. The Vietnamese caretakers were very courteous that day, a little suspicious, but they had been told that the Government had decided to give the place back to us and we were going to use it as a consulate in the former capital of our former ally.

We had been talking about the War at half-priced burger Monday at Witlow's on Wilson that morning. One of my co-workers had been the intelligence officer at the Joint Task Force responsible for finding the lost dead of the Vietnamese war, and we had crossed paths, if not met, in Hanoi in 1996. I was staying at the Metropole with the Congressman's party, since we were there to try to normalize relations. I liked the Metropole. It was very French had been where they put up Hanoi Jane Fonda when she visited and tormented our POWs. My associate had been staying around the corner at the NVA billeting, so that the Socialists could gouge our government direct and eliminate the middle-man. He was engaged in trying to find holes in the soil made by the impact of jet aircraft, and of lonely graves on ambush trails.

On the whole, I liked my job better. I heard later that my co-worker despised me, confessing his contempt to a woman he did know was my friend. I don't mind. If some people don't like you it must mean that you are doing something right.

I had been impressed by the French colonial character of the old city, what remained of it, but the cranes were rising all around, the high-rise buildings coming. My co-worker said it went downhill fast from a quality of life perspective. But I will never forget the throngs of little men in green on their bicycles, all in the standard green pith helmet to stay cool in the hot sun. I bought one from a vendor who approached me near the site of the John McCain monument, where the Senator landed when he was shot down and became our most famous POW. The Vietnamese are indomitable and tenacious people, and having won, they can afford to be gracious. And they are.

But the commentary this morning comparing the events in Baghdad to the assault at Tet is misleading. The Vietnamese gave it everything they had. Or rather, the North gave everything their Viet Cong brethren in the South had to give. We killed almost all thecadres who came at our forces, startled but lethal. It was the unraveling of the pat story from the White House that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that the War was going well that became the retreat. But we already knew that about Iraq, and this was no Tet offensive. We exhausted the Vietnamese stocks of munitions and we killed their best cadres. It took them years to come back, and they did not achieve victory until there were no U.S. forces in the field to oppose the NVA regular army and their tanks.

There is something interesting about the more thoughtful analysis, or at least what the spin-doctors of the Coalition Forces are saying this morning. I will be interested to see if what they say plays out. The contention is that the suicide bombings yesterday brought a new wrinkle to the resistance. The Iraqis have not been suicide bombers. A Syrian passport was found on the corpse in one demolished car, and the popular perception is that Jihadists from elsewhere are coming and blowing themselves up. Due to the security, they have been killing far more Iraqis than Americans, and the pragmatic Iraqis are starting to get pissed off. "Take your holy war elsewhere- we just got the power back on!"

And things in places are getting better, and Paul Wolfowitz was cheered when he toured Kirkuk in the North. So what we see and what we here is not all of what is going on. The DepSecDef who was in the al Rashid Hotel when it got rocketed over the weekend. The hotel was the old crown jewel of Baghdad and Saddam had a mosaic of President George H.W. Bush placed on the floor inside the front door so guests would have to walk on his face when they arrived. The mosaic is gone, expunged, but the attackers in that incident seem thoroughly Iraqi. The rocket launcher was concealed in a green trailer, disguised as one of the ubiquitous portable generators so common in the capital. The guards saw two men open the side of the trailer and then they disappeared, gone as abrubtly as the Bush mosaic. The rockets were on timers, which meant that the men had a chance to run and fight again.

It was lucky that ten or so of the little Katusha devices did not go off or it might have been worse, and they might have got the DepSecDef. That would have been a coup.

Che Guevera was one of the Jiahdists of another age. Brother Fidel sent him off to Bolivia to rouse the teeming masses, but the peasants looked blankly at the intense and urbane young Argentinean. One of them turned his whereabouts over the to the CIA who was hunting him, and with the Government, shot him down like a dog. So there may be hope that the Baghdad street may turn on the foreigners and the battle may be winnable. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

And maybe it is a locomotive coming this way. I suppose it all depends on whether this was the Tet Offensive or something else. If it is something else, maybe regular electricity, an uncorrupt and un-murderous police force and a functioning economy will bring a shining example to the stagnant states of the Middle East.

I don't know. I got an e-mail from the veteran's organization back in Michigan that assists us old servicemen transitioning to private life. They are looking for a few good vets to go over and train the new Iraqi Army. They are prepared to pay $55K a year, plus danger pay, and it would be tax-free. There are some mornings that might be appealing. But for now I am going to hedge my bets.