Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
It's ludicrous for anyone who knows this to buy into it. Tet was a made-up loss, specifically made-up to serve the desires of the writers, and those writers succeeded, because they turned public opinion around with their mischaracterizations and lost the war for us. It's like you're saying that we're not really having any real problems, but the press wants us to think that we're having real problems, so, yeah, we're having real problems, even though we're not having any real problems except for the press telling us we're having real problems . . .
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Well, OK. Frankly, I remember little about the Tet offensive, so I'll leave this to you and Ty to sort out.
I will observe, though, that the blog you cited is (a) encouraging as a recap of abysmal Ba'athist military strategy, but (b) light on its assessment of effectiveness as a guerilla campaign. As Ty has stated, it
is a different kind of war, and even if it sucks ass as a tactical matter, it might not, um, matter if the populace loses faith in the proposition that the Americans will restore order.
As to how that's going, it seems to me that noone really knows (yet). They're all staring at different parts of the elephant, and the conservatives are focusing on the tusks, while the liberals find themselves facing the tail. We're still struggling for a sense of perspective on it.
Meantime,
Jim Hoagland of WaPo observes that this isn't really a nationalist struggle, or one (at the moment) engaged in by a significant swath of the ethnic populations. It's about the Ba'athists who reeeeeealy want the power back, and it's about the money.
Gatti(a tractor trailer full of cash and gold bars? Jesus. Three Kings redux)gap
