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Today's
Stories
February 2
/ 3, 2008
John Ross
Hilaria
vs. "El Moreno"
February 1,
2008
Ray McGovern
The
Iniquities and Inequalities of War
Diane Farsetta
The Wild Career of James "Dow 36,000" Glassman
Patrick Cockburn
The
Most Dangerous Country in the World for Journalists
Tariq Ali
Et
Tu, New York Times?
Allan Nairn
Eating Dirt for Lunch in Haiti
Rannie Amiri
Collective Punishment in Beirut
Ramzy Baroud
People Power in Gaza: They Simply Did It
Kenneth Couesbouc
The Mother of All Snowballs
Peter Morici
Recession Looms
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Witha "Brutha" Like This: Bill Clinton as White Negro
Rosemary Jackowski
27 Reasons Nader Should Run for President
Scott Campbell
Direct Action to Stop the War Re-emerges
Website of the Day
Betes et Hommes
January 31,
2008
Saul Landau
Return
to Afghanistan
Andy Worthington
Horror at Guantánamo
Mike Whitney
Rate Cut as Dagger: America's Teetering Banking System
Jeff Ballinger
Sustainability for Dictators Initiative? Clinton Praises the
"Suharto of the Steppe"
Tiffany Ten
Eyck
The Saga of the Freightliner Five
William Loren
Katz
Waterboarding:
Torure or Mystery?
Alan Farago
Why the Republicans are in Deep Trouble
Col. Dan Smith
Oh Say Can You See the 2009 Budget?
China Hand
Slouching Toward Islamabad
Dave Lindorff
The Usual Suspects Once Again
Wadner Pierre
Fake Democracy in Haiti
Website of the Day
One Big Union
January 30,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
McCain
vs. Clinton?
Christopher
Ketcham
The Genius of the Development Industrial-Complex
Robert Weissman
America By the Numbers: The Shameful State of the Union
Neve Gordon
An Experiment in Famine
Paul Craig Roberts
Regulation or Deregulation, Which is Worse?
Joanne Mariner
How Anti-Terror Laws Threaten Free Speech
David Macaray
Labor's Only Real Weapon
Liaquat Ali
Khan
Is NATO Committing Genocide in Afghanistan?
Raymond J. Lawrence
Prankster-in-Chief: Bush's Troubling Non-Verbal Communication
Dan Bacher
The Collapse of the Central Valley Salmon
Website of the Day
Onward Through the Fog
January 29,
2008
Franklin C.
Spinney
Bush's
New War Budget: the $70 Billion Hand-Off
Mike Whitney
The Great Credit Unwind of 2008
Alan Farago
Buyer Beware: Florida, the Candidates and the Latin Builders
Association
Patrick Cockburn
"The Americans Bring Us Only Destruction"
Gary Leupp
"We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans:" a Sibel
Edmonds Timeline
R. F. Blader
A
World Without Abortion: USA v. Romania
Ahmad Faruqui
Musharraf's Post-Electoral Prospect
Fran Shor
Obama, the Kennedys and "Change We Can Believe In"
Jeremy Scahill
Secret Trials and Criminal Convictions: the Ordeal of the Blackwater
Protesters
Allan Nairn
Bush's
SOTU: Entitlement, Justice and the War of All Against All
Website of the Day
The Ghost of Rambo
January 28,
2008
Patrick Cockburn
Return
to Fallujah
Paul Craig
Roberts
The End of American Liberty
Allan Nairn
The Breaking of the Gaza Wall
Eyad al-Sarraj
/ Sara Roy
Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza
Martha Rosenberg
Obit for the "Front Page" City
Corporate Crime
Reporter
How They Rip Us Off
David Michael Green
Kristolizing Iraq: What a Great Freakin' War
Jennifer Van
Bergen
What's Left?
Nancy Oden
Survival Tips for Hard Times
Divya Karnad
Saving India's Sea Turtles
James L. Secor
Pissed About Pistorious: Why the Olympics Needs a Gimp
Website of
the Day
Yellow Journalism?
January 26
/ 27, 2008
Uri Avnery
Worse
Than a Crime
JoAnn Wypijewski
How the Clintons Lost It, Whatever the Outcome in S. Carolina
Ralph Nader
Ambition, Power and the Clintons
Paul Craig
Roberts
How Bush Destroyed the Dollar
Paul Watson
I'm Proud to be a Pirate!
John Ross
Murder and Cover-Up in Mexico
Fred Gardner
Ross v. Raging Wire: Employer's Right to Fire Workers Held Sacred
by California Supreme Court
Allan Nairn
Little Hands with Fever: Some Consequences of Poverty Death
Joshua Frank
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey
Binoy Kampmark
Société Générale and the Economic
Meltdown
James T. Phillips
America's Sick Comedy: Bringing the War Home
Stan Cox
The Depressing Truth About Anti-Depressants
Eamonn McCann
Hillary's Lie: "I Brought Peace to Northern Ireland"
Ron Jacobs
The Horizons of History: What's at Stake in Bolivia
Seth Sandronsky
California's Health Care Crisis
Ben Terrall
The Future is Unwritten
Poets' Basement
Tripp, Gardner, Gibbons and Davies
Website of
the Weekend
City of Immigrants
January 25,
2008
Douglas Valentine
Operation
Two-Fold: How the CIA Infiltrated the DEA
Patrick Cockburn
US Troops Will Be In Iraq for 10 More Years: an Interview with
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
JoAnn Wypijewski
Down to the Wire in South Carolina
Heather Gray
Are We Seeing a Racial Shift in the South? Conversations with
South Carolina Voters
Marjorie Cohn
Senate Democrats Poised to Fold to Cheney on FISA
Erica Rosenberg
Environmentalists Out on a Limb: the Perils of Collaboration
Alan Farago
Jeb Bush Goes Nuclear
Robert Weissman
Reclaiming Economic Freedom
Laura Carlsen
Wild Cards: Mining the Hispanic Vote in Nevada
Stephen Lendman
Israeli Repression in the Hebron
Website of the Day
The FIX is In
January 24,
2008
JoAnn Wypijewski
Obama
as Anthologist of Uplift
Paul Craig
Roberts
President Hillary
Alexander Cockburn
Hillary Wants to Talk About Dirty Legal Dealings? Remember Her
Nursing Home Scam?
Kathleen Christison
One and Two State Solutions and the Myth of International Consensus
Jeff Halper
Power to the (Palestinian) People!
Stanley Heller
The Siege of Gaza is Broken
George Wuerthner
The Moronic Sport: ORVs on the Public Lands
Patrick Cockburn
Desperate Iraqi Farmers Turn to Opium
Jeff Sher
Just How "Good" is Your Health Insurance?
Patrick Irelan
Musharraf, the Steadfast Ally?
Charles Modiano
Restoring the Anti-War King
Website of
the Day
An Illustrated History of Trepanation
January 23,
2008
David Rosen
The
Great Disappearing Act: the Presidential Candidates and the Politics
of Sex
David Isenberg
Is
It Really So Hard to Believe That Iran Stopped Its Nuclear Weapons
Program?
Farzana Versey
Hillary's
Harem
Paul Craig
Roberts
The Empire That Must Be Obeyed
Alan Farago
Where Did All the Good Times Go?
Allan Nairn
Indonesian Intelligence Service Threatens to Kill Human Rights
Activist
Kenneth Couesbouc
Another Turn of the Screw
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
How the West was Re-Sold
Michael Donnelly
Obama Strikes Back
Norman Solomon
The Power of Love
Website of the Day
Rafah Today
January 22,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Farewell
to Old Economic Nostrums
JoAnn Wypijewski
King Day in Columbia, South Carolina
Al Giordano
Divide and Conquer Politics: How the Clinton Campaign Armed a
Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada
Felice Pace
Power Politics in the Klamath: Water, Dams and Salmon
Paul Wolf
Bolívar's Sword
Robert Weissman
Deregulation and the Financial Crisis
Dave Lindorff
The Bush Dollar Trap
Marjorie Cohn
Cheney Impeachment Gains Traction
Richard Neville
Keeping Shakespeare in a Box
Don Fitz /
Zaki Baruti
St. Louis Mayor Booed Off MLK Platform
Ben Terrall
Cindy Sheehan and the Virtues of Divisiveness
Sam Husseini
Stoning Martin Luther King, Jr.
Website of
the Day
Defend the Mapuche!
January 21,
2008
Kevin Alexander
Gray
Playing
the Race Card
Linn Washington,
Jr.
Deferring Dreams, Delusions of Democracy
Pam Martens
How Wall Street Blew Itself Up
David Macaray
Labor's Grim Dilemma: Do We Need a Labor Party?
Uri Avnery
Look Who's Talking
Omar Barghouti
Europe's Collusion in Israel's Slow Genocide
Joe DeRaymond
Protest and Trial in D.C.
B.R. Gowani
Why Islam Should Tolerate Images
Shepherd Bliss
The False U.S. Economy
Jean-Guy Allard
Philip Agee Versus the CIA
Dan Bacher
Leaping Steelhead!
Website of
the Day
Destroyed
By a Rising Flood
January 19
/ 20, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Campaign in Black and White
Saul Landau
Good Time Charlie's War
China Hand
Endgame for Pakistan?
Conn Hallinan
Desert Mirage: What Was the Bombing of Syria Really About?
Ron Jacobs
No Retreat
Dave Lindorff
A Tax Rebate Won't Fix This Mess
Andy Worthington
Canada's Humiliating Double Standard on Torture
Paul Armentano
What's the Going Price for a Joint? More Than You Might Think
Seth Sandronsky
High Crimes and Economics
Michael Donnelly
Dodging Ecocide
Patrick Irelan
The Ordeal of Dr. Safdar Sarki
Martha Rosenberg
The Drug Industry Takes Another Hit
Sherwood Ross
Making the World Safe for Despots: Bush's Global Arms Trade
David Michael
Green
So You Want to be My President, Eh?
James Rothenberg
Unimpeachable: Under House Protection
Daniel Gross
Starbucks Shortchanges Dr. King
Peter N. Carroll
In Memory of Milton Wolff
Susie Day
Croakin' on Hudson
Paul Krassner
Woody Allen Meets Tongue Fu
Poets' Basement
Wolff, Buknatski and Orloski
Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain
Blues
January 18,
2008
Allan Nairn
Killing
Civilians, Carefully
Ralph Nader
When
the Big Boys Get in Trouble, Who Pays the Ultimate Bill?
Joanne Mariner
Terrorism and Preventative Detention
Alan Farago
The Stimulus and the Meltdown
P. Sainath
Pity the Brahmins
R.F. Blader
Beyond Steinem's Feminism
Andy Worthington
A Letter from Guantánamo
John Jonik
Private Insurance is Bad for Your Health
Brian McKenna
Where Even Sharing is Prohibited: Notes from Inside a Michigan
Women's Prison
Daoud Kuttab
This Time Next Year?
Website of the Day
Those South Carolina Voting Machines
January 17,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Leader
and Vassal
Christopher
Brauchli
The FBI's Bills Come Due
Robert Fantina
Leadership, Bush and the New York Times
Patrick Irelan
Eternal War
Paul A. Moore
When the Rich Pay No Taxes
Stephen Lendman
Institutionalized Spying on Americans
Beena Sarwar
Bhutto and the "State Within a State"
Walter Brasch
Buzzwords in the Echo Chamber: Change and the Establishment
Brenda Norrell
Bush Legacy in Texas Sours
Adam Federman
End of the Left?
Website of the Day
Democrats for Romney
January 16,
2008
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Return
of the Native
Franklin Lamb
The Bombing at Qarantina
Julian Sanchez
David Weigel
Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?
Sharon Smith
Ron Paul and the Left: a Slippery Slope?
Allan Nairn
Economic Indicator: No Free Lunch, No Free Market
Ayesha Ijaz
Khan
How the American Media Enables Bush's Iran Fixation
Andy Worthington
A Strategic Call to Close Guantánamo
Richard Behan
Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach!
Website of the Day
Obama the New JFK? He's Not That Bad!
January 15,
2008
Andrea Peacock
Breach
of Trust in America's Most Toxic Town: How the EPA is Rubbing
Poison Into Libby's Wounds
Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Seymour Hersh on Iraq, Bush Foreign Policy
and the Prospects of War with Iran
Joe Bageant
Getting Out the Bling Vote
Ralph Nader
The Candidate Taboos
John Ross
Zero Hour: NAFTA and Mexico's Agrarian Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
Jose Padilla vs. John Yoo: Can a National Disgrace be Rectified?
Peter Morici
The Fed Needs More Than a New Communications Strategy
Beena Sarwar
Pakistan's Dirty Tricks Brigade
Robert Weissman
Big Business is Even More Unpopular Than You Thought
Binoy Kampmark
Going Tata in India
Dave Zirin
Dennis Brutus Smacks Down the Hall of Fame
Website of
the Day
David Lynch on the iPhone
January 14,
2008
Ishmael Reed
Ma
and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man
Roger Morris
Burials in the Sind
Uri Avnery
The
Hands of Esau
Mike Whitney
Bush's Voodoo Stimulus Package
Allan Nairn
General Suharto of Indonesia: One Small Man Leaves a Million
Corpses
William Blum
Oh, By the Way, the Iraqis Don't Really Want Us
Alan Farago
A Subprime Wake Up Call
David Macaray
Are Labor Unions Ready for Prime Time?
Eva Liddell
Getting Drunk with Obama
Zoe Blunt
Road Kill: New Highway Blocked by Protesting Raccoons
Website of the Day
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies
January 12
/ 13, 2008
Andrew Cockburn
How
the New England Journal of Medicine Undercounted Iraqi Civilian
Deaths
Saul Landau
60
Years of Empire
Corey D. B. Walker
Barack Obama and the Crisis of the White Intellectual
Col. Dan Smith
Bush, Iran and the Magician of the Tarot
Eric Toussaint
The US Subprime Crisis Goes Global
Ron Jacobs
Television, Murder and Vietnam
Fred Gardner
The People vs. Christopher James Chakos
Stan Cox
Don't Take That Pill!
Jacob G. Hornberger
The Warfare State
Ramzy Baroud
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Joseph Grosso
The Anglosphere: a Special Relationship of Elites
David Díaz-Arias
Imagining An/Other Latin American Left
Stacey Warde
Before We Move On ...
Dan Bacher
Pumped to Extinction: the Decline of the Delta Smelt
Michael Dickinson
Georgie in Jesusland
Website of
Weekend
CounterPunchers Protest Outside NYT Offices
January 11,
2008
Dave Lindorff
Did
Hillary Really Win New Hampshire? More Questions About Diebold
Voting Machines
Paul Craig
Roberts
No
Escape from War and Unemployment
Andy Worthington
Six Years of Guantánamo
Kenneth Couesbouc
Banking on Thin Ice
Jeff Ballinger
Inside the Vienna Consensus
Christopher
Brauchli
Lethal Injection, the Supremes and China
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Paying No Attention to the Presidential Campaigns
Andrew Silverstein
Bush's Weepy Visit to Jerasulem
Marwan Bishara
Bush in the Middle East
Robert Weissman
The First Amendment Gone Wild
Patrick Irelan
Damn the Small Boats!
Website of
the Day
Hillary and the Superdelegates: Or Why She Wins Even When She
Loses
January 10,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
Now
Nader Claims He Didn't Endorse Edwards
Bob Wing
Marqueece Harris-Dawson
Race Within the Race: Obama, the NH Vote and the Specter of Tom
Bradley
Michael Donnelly
White Women Gone Wild?
David Macaray
Three Big Reasons for the Decline of Labor Unions
China Hand
Bush's Delusional Policy Pushes Pakistan to Brink of Catastrophe
Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: Brotherly, Friendly Countries?
Rannie Amiri
Obama, Man of Kansas or Kenya?
Website of the Day
Iranian Video of the Hormuz Incident
January 9,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
Dave Lindorff
The Bad News from New Hampshire: Death By Triangulation
John Chuckman
Pardon My Laughter: Watching the US Primaries from Canada
James Bovard
Stomping Freedom: Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006
Alan Farago
As Florida Sinks: the View from the Titanic
Russell Mokhiber
Why Picket the New York Times in DC on Friday?
William S. Lind
Kicking the Can Down the Road in Iraq
Peter Morici
Beyond the Sophistry: Why the Trade Deficit Matters
Josh Reubner
Sudan vs. Israel: Double Standard on Divestment
Mike Roselle
The Pursuit of Happiness
Website of the Day
Bottles of Tears on the Wall: Steve Perry on NH
January 8,
2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
No
Jobs for the New Economy (or the Old)
Russell Mokhiber
The Black Hillary: Obama is Just Another Political Sedative
Robert Fantina
The Gulf of Tonkin and the Strait of Hormuz
Dave Zirin
Butts on Parade
Shamako Nobel
I Am an Emcee: the Politics of Hip Hop
John Ross
Zapatista Women Encounter Themselves
Brenda Norrell
Apaches Defend Homeland from Homeland Security
Laura Carlsen
Why Bolivia Matters
Patrick Irelan
Remember the Maine!
Evelyn J. Pringle
The Holes in Bush's FDA
Jonathan M.
Feldman
After Iowa and New Hampshire: a Strategy for Rebuilding the Peace
Movement
Michael Dickinson
Playing Soldier
Website of
the Day
Sean Hannity on the Run!
January 7,
2008
Chris Floyd
There
Will Be Blood: But No Justice for Iraq Atrocities
John Blair
Remove That Man! Creeping Fascism in Indiana
Uri Avnery
The Case of the White Bird
Andy Worthington
Who Are the Gitmo Saudis?
Binoy Kampmark
Needling the Convict: Lethal Injection and the Supreme Court
David Macaray
Women on Strike
Ralph Nader
Obamarama: the Politics of the Smooth Mood
Michael Donnelly
It's the War Vote(s), Stupid!
Ron Jacobs
Ron Paul's Run: Is Being Against the War Enough?
Gideon Levy
The Hostile President
Dave Lindorff
A Real 9/11 Cover-Up? Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb
Website of
the Day
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
January 5 /
6, 2008
Douglas Valentine
Good
Guys in Black Hoods
Kevin Young
The
US Occupation and Popular Opinion in Iraq
Richard Rhames
Saddam
Who?
Saul Landau
Bush Snatches Defeat from Victory
Marc Lynch
Why Bush's Iran Strategy is Failing
Robert Fantina
Iowa, Democrats and the Iraq War
Donna Volatile
Antiwar Soldier: an Interview with Jonathan Hutto, Sr.
Jelle Bruinsma
Norman Finkelstein in The Netherlands
Bob Sutcliffe
Remembering Andrew Glyn, Rebel Economist
Harvey Wasserman
Anti-Nuclear Renaissance
Missy Beattie
Why Obama Can't Save Us
David Swanson
Remembering the Separation of Powers
Jacob Hornberger
The Importance of the Padilla Case
Shepherd Bliss
Survival Tools from Kokopelli Farms
Ron Jacobs
Bleeding Kansas
Poets' Basement
Patti Smith, B.R. Gowani and Peter Buknatski
Website of the Weekend
Jimmy Dean Sausage Call Complaint
January 4,
2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Good Night in Iowa
Jonathan Cook
War Crimes Airbrushed from History
Paul Craig Roberts
Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime
Stan Goff
Ron Paul's Monkeywrench
Dave Lindorff
Clinton's Iowa Flop Exposes DLC Myths as Frauds
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
To Pindi Station
Allan Nairn
U.S. Elections Over Before They Began
Joshua Frank
The Failures of Sectarianism
Peter Morici
Economy on the Skids
Mary McInnis
Iowa Cocky-Us: How to be a Caucus Tease
Website of the Day
The Return of Obama Girl
January 3,
2008
Fatima Bhutto
Farewell
to Wadi Bua
Pam Martens
The
Free Market Myth Dissolves into Chaos
Joanne Mariner
The Presidential Candidates and Torture
Zoltan Grossman
Remember the '80s: Social Movements Between Woodstock and the
Web
David Domke
The Echoing Press and Huckabee
Norman Solomon
Edwards Reconsidered
Nikolas Kozloff
Return of the Faux Liberal
Jacob G. Hornberger
The Padilla Case and the Future of Habeas Corpus
Martha Rosenberg
Quit Picking on Huckabee's Son, Michael Vick
Russell Means
This Property is Condemned: a Notice to Those Occupying Lakotah
Lands
Website of the Day
WolfQuest
|
Weekend
Edition
February 2 / 3, 2008
The Turning Point
in the Vietnam War
Tet
Reconsidered
By JOE ALLEN
In the early morning hours of January
30, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of
the lunar New Year, soldiers of the South Vietnamese National
Liberation Front (NLF) breached the wall surrounding the American
embassy in Saigon. They then raced across the compound where
they tried but failed to enter the main building. The NLF soldiers
(derisively known as the "Viet Cong" to the Americans
and their Saigon allies) sprayed the embassy with rockets and
fought a six-hour battle with American military police. All nineteen
NLF soldiers were killed or badly wounded along with five Americans
and one South Vietnamese employee of the embassy. One reporter
at the scene of the battle described it as "a butcher shop
in Eden." This attack on the very citadel of American power
in South Vietnam was brazen in and of itself, but it soon became
clear that this was the opening battle of a nationwide military
offensive by the NLF and the North Vietnamese that shook the
foundations of the American military and political establishment.
The supporters of the American
war in Vietnam never recovered from the humiliation from what
has gone down in the history books as the Tet Offensive. But
is Tet just for the history books? What can the Tet Offensive
teach antiwar activists today about bringing an end to the American
war in Iraq? To understand the lasting impact of Tet we need
to look at the wider political context in which the offensive
took place.
In late 1967, General William
Westmoreland, the commanding officer of all U.S. forces in Vietnam,
returned to the United States at the request of President Lyndon
Johnson, who was planning on running for reelection the following
year, to give an upbeat assessment of the American war in Vietnam.
He toured the country talking about the "thinning of the
ranks of the Viet Cong" and the coming end of the war. Typical
of Westmoreland's speeches was the one he gave before the National
Press Club in Washington, D.C. "We have reached a point,"
Westmoreland declared confidently, "when the end begins
to come into view," though "mopping up the enemy"
could take another two years. TheWashington Post ran a headline
story about his press club appearance: "War's end in view--Westmoreland."
Simultaneously, however, Westmoreland was asking Washington for
a few hundred thousand more troops over and above the 485,000
that were already there.
Westmoreland's confident public
predictions were significantly at odds with the war on the ground.
More than a decade after the U.S. committed itself to creating
a non-communist authoritarian government in Saigon, it was no
more popular in late 1967 than it was ten years earlier. It was
a corrupt, vicious dictatorship that was completely dependent
on the U.S. military presence to keep it from collapsing. Westmoreland
was also cooking the books in regard to the total number of "enemy"
soldiers fighting against the U.S. and its allies in South Vietnam--to
prove that he was winning the war. Westmoreland claimed a total
of 285,000 NLF and North Vietnam soldiers were engaged in combat
in South Vietnam, while the CIA estimated that there were at
least 500,000 to 600,000 resistance fighters. When General Earle
Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was informed
of this enormous discrepancy he panicked. "If these figures
should reach the public," he wrote Westmoreland, "they
would, literally, blow the lid off Washington. Please do whatever
is necessary to insure that these figures are not, repeat not,
released to the news media."
Tet was the lunar New Year,
a major holiday in Vietnam celebrated by relatives traveling
long distances to visit one another. Since the American bombing
campaign had driven many people into the cities, a large number
traveled to the largest cities. Fireworks of various sorts marked
the Tet holiday, and it was normal that many strangers would
be around. This made it a perfect time for the NLF to smuggle
soldiers and weapons into the cities. The Americans also believed
that there would be a lull in military activity because of the
Tet holiday. The plans for Tet were drawn up a year before in
Hanoi with the personal approval of NLF leader, Ho Chi Minh.
While there had been military offensives in the past around Tet,
the one planned for 1968 was nothing less than an effort to shift
the course of the war against the United States. In April 1967,
the Thirteenth Plenum of the Vietnamese Communist Party's central
committee passed Resolution 13 calling for a "spontaneous
uprising [in the South] in order to win a decisive victory in
the shortest possible time."
But there were divisions among
the North Vietnamese concerning the upcoming offensive. The most
senior North Vietnamese military commander, General Vo Nguyen
Giap, the architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in
1954--a defeat which signaled the end of France's occupation
of Vietnam--disagreed over the conception of Tet. He argued that
it risked too much in a direct confrontation with the American
military, something the North Vietnamese and NLF had successfully
avoided in the previous two years. Giap's concerns were overridden
and he was ordered to draw up plans for the coming offensive.
Giap carefully planned the coming offensive, code-named "Tong
Cong Kich--Tong Khoi Ngia" or "General Offensive--General
Uprising."
The Tet Offensive actually
began in late 1967--during the dry season in Vietnam--when the
North Vietnamese and the NLF launched military feints to draw
American military forces away from the major cities. Up until
Tet, the war had been primarily confined to the countryside.
The French newspaperLe Monde reported in January 1968 that a
"sustained and general offensive" had the Americans
pinned back in defensive positions. The American press by and
large reported uncritically on Westmoreland's upbeat accounts
of the war and seemed to ignore what the French press and others
saw happening around them. On January 20, the North Vietnamese
Army (NVA) began a siege of the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh
near the Laotian border. Westmoreland was convinced that the
Vietnamese wanted to repeat at Khe Sanh the victory they had
achieved at Dien Bien Phu fourteen years earlier. Johnson was
so nervous about the situation that he had a model of Khe Sanh
in the White House and made his generals pledge that Khe Sanh
could be held no matter what. He reportedly barked at his generals:
"I don't want any damn Dinbinphoo!"
Westmoreland and Johnson's
obsession with Khe Sanh, a base of little strategic value, revealed
how much they were misreading the battlefield. While the NVA
was laying siege at Khe Sanh and Westmoreland correspondingly
rushed reinforcements to his besieged troops, the NLF moved into
place elsewhere. In January, tens of thousands of NLF troops
moved into the larger provincial towns and cities. They smuggled
weapons and explosives in coffins, burying them in cemeteries
for future use. As one American journalist observed, once in
the cities "the Viet Cong were absorbed into the population
by the urban underground like out of town relatives attending
a family reunion."
It is a testament to the deep
roots and widespread sympathy for the Vietnamese nationalist
movement that no one tipped off the Saigon government or the
Americans that such a large military build-up was taking place.
But it is also a testament to the bureaucratic complacency of
American planners, who had in their possession an appeal to the
People's Army [the official name of the North Vietnamese Army]
that recommended "strong military attacks in coordination
with the uprisings of the local population to take over towns
and cities."
In his 1971 book, TET! The
Turning Point in the Vietnam War, investigative reporter Dan
Oberdorfer explained the reasons behind the failure of U.S. forces
to anticipate the scale and character of the coming attack, in
spite of their possessing information indicating a major attack
was immanent:
The inertial force of habit
and of bureaucracy overpowered the evidence at hand. Belief in
a tremendous impending attack would have required tremendous
counter-efforts. Personal plans would have to be altered; holidays
and furloughs canceled; daily habits of comfort and convenience
in previously safe cities abandoned. If an official reported
"progress" last month and the months before that and
had been praised for his tidings of success, how did he justify
reporting an impending crisis now? Official assessments of Communist
weakness would have to be discarded or explained away; public
predictions would have to be eaten. It could not be done.
American arrogance and racism
also played its part in the Tet fiasco. Americans, whether in
uniform or civilian garb, referred to the Vietnamese people as
"dinks" and "gooks," while boasting that
Americans had never lost a war. This lethal mix of inertia, arrogance,
and racism was about to blow up in their faces.
On the night of January 29--30,
the main part of the offensive began, when 70,000 NVA/NLF soldiers
attacked thirty-four of forty-four provincial capitals, sixty-four
district capitals, and many military installations. More than
100 targets were hit all over South Vietnam, including the American
embassy in Saigon. Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam, fell
to the combined forces of the NVA and the NLF. "The feat
stunned U.S. and world opinion," according to liberal anticommunist
historian Stanley Karnow. The NLF flag flew over the citadel
in Hue for the next three weeks. "Joking and laughing, the
soldiers walk in the streets and gardens without showing any
fear.... Numerous civilians brought them great quantities of
food. It didn't seem that these residents were being coerced
in any way," according to a dispatch by Agence France-Presse
correspondent Francois Mazure. Mazure was soon expelled from
South Vietnam by the Saigon government for spreading "procommunist"
propaganda.
In Saigon, 1,000 NLF troops
took the city and managed to hold it for three weeks against
a combined force of more than 11,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese
Army (ARVN) troops. Westmoreland tried to portray the offensive
as the death rattle of the NLF, similar to the Battle of the
Bulge by the Germans in the final phase of the Second World War.
Michigan governor George Romney told a group of New York reporters,
"If what we have seen in the past week is a Viet Cong failure,
then I hope they never have a victory."
After the first reports of
the attacks on Saigon and other cities, Westmoreland still thought
them diversionary to what he considered the main enemy effort
at Khe Sanh!
The U.S. responded with what
one reporter called "the most hysterical use of American
firepower ever seen," particularly air power. "The
Viet Cong had the government by the throat in those provincial
towns," explained one U.S. military adviser. "Ordinary
methods would have never gotten them out, and the government
did not have enough troops to do the job, so firepower was substituted."
But firepower alone in some
cases wasn't enough. The North Vietnamese Army and the NLF held
Hue for twenty-five days, and it was only retaken in vicious
house-to-house fighting by Marines and ARVN forces. Superior
firepower (in the air and on the ground), however, tipped the
balance. "Nothing I saw during the Korean War, or in the
Vietnam War so far," wrote Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker,
who toured Hue after its destruction, "has been as terrible,
in terms of destruction and despair, as what I saw in Hue."
One report after the battle found that 80 percent of the city's
buildings had been destroyed.
The American and South Vietnamese
response to Tet forever altered the American public's perception
of the war in Vietnam. It is now reminiscent of one of those
"dirty colonial wars" fought by one of the declining
European imperial powers (like the French in Algeria or the British
in Kenya) trying to hold on at all cost against the wishes of
the subjugated population. It was clear from the scope of the
Tet Offensive that the mass of the South Vietnamese people were
opposed to the Americans and in support of the NLF, the complete
opposite of what the American public had been told for years.
The destruction U.S. forces wreaked on South Vietnam shocked
many back home and the Orwellian thinking to justify the violence
made it even worse. Ben Tre in Kien Hoa Province was obliterated
by U.S. firepower. "We had to destroy the town to save it,"
the commanding officer in charge of recapturing Ben Tre told
reporters--"coining one of the most notorious phrases of
the war and a fitting motto for the U.S. counterattack against
the Tet offensive," writes Hunt.
The war literally came into
American homes every night, with film footage of besieged American
soldiers huddled behind tanks fighting for their lives, not in
the remote countryside, but in the "secure" cities.
Then came the film footage, broadcast all over the world, of
Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's police chief, summarily
executing a suspected NLF officer by shooting him in the head
with a pistol, a scene that looked to many as straight out of
film clips of Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World
War.
Another Nazi-like incident
took place at a village called My Lai in March 1968, when American
soldiers led by Lt. William Calley executed more than 300 unarmed
men, women, and children in ditches. It would be a year and a
half before the My Lai massacre became public.
While American firepower pushed
back the Tet Offensive, the costs were high. During the offensive
South Vietnamese forces were severely mauled at the hands of
the NVA and the NLF. The Americans suffered nearly 4,000 casualties
between January 30 and March 31, 1968. American military forces
were clearly demoralized after Tet, beginning the process of
decay and rebellion that would reach crisis proportions in the
remaining years of the war. A March 3 State Department report
dismally concluded:
We know that despite a massive
influx of 500,000 U.S. troops, 1.2 million tons of bombs, 400,000
sorties per year, 200,000 KIA [killed in action] in three years,
20,000 U.S. KIA, etc., our control of the countryside and the
defense of the urban levels is now essentially at pre-August
1965 levels. We have achieved a stalemate at a high commitment.
Yet it should be noted that
Tet was also extremely costly for the Vietnamese nationalist
forces, especially for the NLF. The anticipated urban uprisings
that the attacks were meant to inspire did not happen. Moreover,
in addition to the tremendous casualties they suffered in the
attempt to take and hold cities (around 40,000, according to
one estimate), the absence of NLF fighters in the villages exposed
their rural bases to attack. According to historian Marilyn Young,
"In Long An province, for example, local guerrillas taking
part in the May--June offensive had been divided into several
sections. Only 775 out of 2,018 in one section survived; another
lost all but 640 out of 1,430. The province itself was subjected
to what one historian has called a ëMy Lai from the Sky'--non-stop
B-52 bombing."
The effect of Tet on domestic
U.S. politics was swift and dramatic. Walter Cronkite, the anchor
of "CBS Evening News" and considered the most respected
figure in television journalism, was apparently furious when
he heard about the Tet Offensive. "What the hell is going
on? I thought we were winning the war!" he is reported to
have said. Cronkite went to Vietnam in late February and then
in front of millions of American viewers said: "It is increasingly
clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then,
will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable peopleÖ[who]
did the best they could."
Johnson's personal popularity
had been declining for two years. Tet decimated his credibility
with the American public. Six weeks after the Tet Offensive began,
"public approval of [Johnson's] overall performance dropped
from 48 percent to 36 percent--and, more dramatically, endorsement
for his handling of the war fell from 40 percent to 26 percent."
Eugene McCarthy, a relatively obscure first-term U.S. senator
from Minnesota who was for American withdrawal from Vietnam,
nearly defeated Johnson in the February New Hampshire Democratic
primary. Soon after McCarthy's new victory, Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.),
a much more substantial threat for Johnson's renomination by
the Democratic Party, announced that he too would be running
for president on an antiwar platform. Robert McNamara, secretary
of defense and an architect of the war in Vietnam, was replaced
by Clark Clifford. Clifford, a longtime Washington lawyer and
adviser to Democratic presidents, began a massive review of U.S.
war policies in Vietnam that would quickly convince him of the
need for the U.S. to get out.
The final blow to Johnson came
from the very same people who had just recently endorsed his
war policies, the U.S. State Department's Senior Informal Advisory
Group--popularly known as the "wise men." The wise
men were a group of the most senior advisers on foreign policy
in the United States, many of whom were architects of the postwar
world, including Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, John
J. McCloy, former American high commissioner for occupied Germany,
and many others. They met with Johnson on March 18 and told him
that his policies were in shambles and that U.S. interests demanded
that the troops begin withdrawing from Vietnam. Johnson was stunned.
He addressed the nation on March 31 and announced that he would
not seek reelection as president. The presidential race was now
wide open. The antiwar movement began to surge in the U.S. and
American politics was dominated by the question of withdrawal
from Vietnam. In November 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency
over Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by almost the
same margin he had lost eight years earlier against Kennedy.
Nixon won largely due to the impression given by his campaign
that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive was only
the opening shot of a year in which the U.S. ruling class and
its allies around the world faced the greatest challenges to
its rule in a generation. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated and 100 cities rose in rebellion. In May, a student
rebellion in Paris ignited a general strike by French workers,
the largest in that country's history, putting back on the agenda
the possibility of a workers' revolution in an advanced industrial
country. Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California
primary in June. Mayor Daley's cops' brutal attack on antiwar
demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago drew the
world's attention to political repression in America, while the
Democrats, ignoring the wishes of their primary voters, nominated
Johnson's prowar vice president Hubert Humphrey as the presidential
nominee of their party. These brutal and treacherous events (all
related in some way to the war in Vietnam) convinced a substantial
number of political activists to embrace one form or another
of revolutionary politics in order to change the world. Meanwhile
in Vietnam, the U.S. military started to report major disciplinary
problems with its troops that marked the beginning of a soldiers'
rebellion. Within a few years, the U.S. Army was no longer capable
of waging a war on the ground and had to be withdrawn from Vietnam.
What do the events of four
decades ago mean for antiwar activists today? The greatest lesson
of Tet is the importance of the resistance of the victims of
U.S. imperialism in bringing about the end of the war. The Vietnamese
have a long and proud tradition of resistance to foreign domination
from a thousand-year resistance to the Chinese to the defeat
of the Japanese and the French during and after the Second World
War. This tradition enabled them to withstand the American military
onslaught, while the Tet Offensive broke the will of the United
States government to continue the war.
The Vietnamese resistance also
inspired many in the American antiwar movement, who drew a direct
connection between the Vietnamese national struggle and the radical
tradition in the United States. Dave Dellinger, a long time radical
pacifist and a leading Vietnam antiwar activist, when brought
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in December
1968 told them:
I make a comparison between
the Vietnamese people, who feel that there is no other way to
defend the independence and the sanctity of their homeland than
by the use of violence, I compare them to the American patriots
under George Washington who also used violence. The word "terror"
is a tough one, you know, what constitutes "terror."
[Our patriots] applied methods similar to those of the NLF against
the British and, also, by the way, against American Tories.
Tet continues to haunt America's
military planners to this day. In July of 2007, Major General
Rick Lynch told reporters in the Green Zone in Baghdad, "We're
concerned about some kind of Tet offensive that's going to affect
the debate in Washington." We can only hope that it comes
sooner than later.
Joe Allen is the author of a forthcoming book
on the Vietnam War and the Vietnam antiwar movement (Haymarket
Books, 2008), and is a frequent contributor to the ISR. He can
be reached at joeallen705@gmail.com.
Sources
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations:
The United States, 1945--1974 (Oxford University Press, New York/
Oxford, 1996).
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam
Wars 1945--1990 (Harper Perennial, New York, 1991).
David Hunt, "Remembering
the Tet Offensive" in Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn
B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and America (Grove Press,
New York, 1995).
Cecil B. Currey, Victory at
Any Cost: The Genius of Vietnam's Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap (Brassey's,
Inc., Washington/London, 1997).
Eric Bentley, Thirty Years
of Treason: Excerpts from Hearing Before the House Committee
on Un-American Activities 1938--1968 (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation
Books, New York, 2002).
Don Oberdorfer, TET: the Turning
Point in the Vietnam War (New York: Avon Books, 1971).
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