On February 1, 1968--during the Tet Offensive--General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, director of South Vietnam's national police force, executed a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon.THE VIETNAM WAR : 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF TET OFFENSIVE
International terrorists are openly and aggressively talking about their own 'Tet offensive'
Thursday January 31, 2008
By ALAN DAWSON
Bangkok Post
Forty years ago this morning, the city of Saigon was the focus of one of the most audacious battles of history. The Tet offensive, named because Jan 31, 1968 was the first day of the Chinese New Year (called ''Tet'' in Vietnamese), turned the Vietnam War into eventual communist victory, but it also changed the conduct of wars. Lately, few successful conflicts have been fought without a campaign comparable to Vietnam's Tet offensive, and that raises the rather alarming but relevant question of when, rather than if, the worldwide terrorist group best known as al-Qaeda can raise a similar action.
One of the lessons of the Tet offensive is that nations and communities sometimes face enemies willing to die in huge numbers. The attack on the US Embassy was a suicide mission, but so were hundreds of the other specific attacks on the night of Jan 30, 1968.
The Tet offensive attacked more than 40 towns and cities across Vietnam simultaneously.
''If not for the Tet offensive, there would be two Vietnams,'' an exceedingly bitter Communist Party official and Viet Cong officer told me when I was researching a book on the final Hanoi offensive of the war. ''The North Vietnamese army totally sacrificed the southern fighters, destroyed what you called the Viet Cong.''
From mid-1968, Hanoi took full and detailed control of the war, and of the victory. The next three offensives - at Easter 1972, in the final 55-day conquest of Saigon and South Vietnam in March and April of 1975, and in January 1979 to defeat the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - were traditional military campaigns. They were planned, led and fought by the uniformed, mainstream army of North Vietnam.
As of March 1968, the Viet Cong were utterly defeated. The southern communists never played an important role in any battle again, and North Vietnam subsumed the South within months of the April 30, 1975 capture of Saigon, which was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
But the importance of the Tet offensive was not the military result. Even the North Vietnamese participants lost every battle of the Tet offensive and failed to spark a popular uprising. But they then went on to win the war. Vietnam's top living war veteran, Gen Vo Nguyen Giap, says the battlefield was a lot wider than Vietnam, and ''the most important [war front] was American public opinion''.
Few doubt that. The Tet offensive turned the mainstream media against the war, invigorated the so-called anti-war movement, and ultimately forced the withdrawal of all American combat forces within three years. It took another four years for the communists to achieve victory, but no journalist or historian doubts that the Tet offensive was the most significant turning point of the entire war.
The Tet offensive is history, but hugely relevant in today's world.
Arguably, civilised society is more sensitive about war casualties. But its enemies are more callous about suicide missions and mass civilian casualties than during the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. International terrorists are openly and aggressively talking about just such a campaign. Analogies are useful: Terrorism is the overall war; the attacks on the United States in 2001 were a sneaky surprise like Pearl Harbour, and the massive, coordinated strikes on separate targets is to be al-Qaeda's Tet offensive.
The highly respected US military analyst Colonel Austin Bay recently got a ripple of attention by his stark prediction: ''Sometime within the next six months or so, al-Qaeda or Saddam's terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive.''
But Col Bay wrote that the battle would be as isolated as the Tet offensive, and limited to a single country. It ''would feature simultaneous terror strikes in every major Iraqi city [which] would inflict hideous civilian casualties''.
There is strong evidence that this is a tremendously humble and unimaginative forecast about a seething, suicidal and certainly energetic enemy.
For example, in a recent, 30-day internet blitz, jihadist supporters worldwide were encouraged to ask questions of the No. 2 al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Egyptian doctor seemed clearly out of his league in cyberspace and current Islamist opinion. In those worlds, there is a clear desire - aching need, really - for a Tet offensive.
Why hasn't al-Qaeda begun operations in Palestine? Why isn't al-Qaeda operating in Iran? Why doesn't al-Qaeda open a front in Egypt? Why are the Jews in the world not struck, in Israel and the US? We want to act in (Syria and Lebanon) and we are ready to do so.
In one of his rambling, defensive replies, the befuddled Zawahiri tries to answer dozens of these questions at once: ''We will not abandon Andalucia, Sebta, Melilla [Spanish possessions claimed by Morocco], Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Haifa, Um Rashrash [Eliat, Israel], Baghdad, Kabul, and Kashmir and Grozny.''
The public call of the new Africa-based terrorist subsidiary Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is to spread attacks across borders in northern Africa, into Spain and - especially - France.
Zawahiri's feeble response never would have been tolerated by Gen Giap. Yet, al-Qaeda arguably has displayed a new tendency. It seems clearly to be adopting the main theme of Vietnam's Tet offensive by going after public opinion by using internet propaganda. It also is reversing the Vietnamese standard of top-down planning and direction, by trying to turn Islamist terror into a true people's war, ordered and organised from the bottom up.
A current Vietnamese army analyst and professor, Lt-Gen Nguyen Dinh Uoc, wrote in the official Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan this week that: ''The US forces were completely surprised, regardless of their large intelligence units, by three decisive factors: new forms of attack and directions, the good timing and well-organised preparations.'' A seminar in Ho Chi Minh City last week also emphasised the ''clear-sighted, independent and self-reliant military line'' of the Tet offensive.
Clearly there will be more ''Tet offensives'', and probably one by international terrorist gangs. But there should now be a difference. The first Tet offensive was a surprise; no future Tet offensive should have that advantage.
The writer covered the Tet offensive and Vietnam War from Saigon.
Thursday January 31, 2008
By ALAN DAWSON
Bangkok Post
Forty years ago this morning, the city of Saigon was the focus of one of the most audacious battles of history. The Tet offensive, named because Jan 31, 1968 was the first day of the Chinese New Year (called ''Tet'' in Vietnamese), turned the Vietnam War into eventual communist victory, but it also changed the conduct of wars. Lately, few successful conflicts have been fought without a campaign comparable to Vietnam's Tet offensive, and that raises the rather alarming but relevant question of when, rather than if, the worldwide terrorist group best known as al-Qaeda can raise a similar action.
One of the lessons of the Tet offensive is that nations and communities sometimes face enemies willing to die in huge numbers. The attack on the US Embassy was a suicide mission, but so were hundreds of the other specific attacks on the night of Jan 30, 1968.
The Tet offensive attacked more than 40 towns and cities across Vietnam simultaneously.
''If not for the Tet offensive, there would be two Vietnams,'' an exceedingly bitter Communist Party official and Viet Cong officer told me when I was researching a book on the final Hanoi offensive of the war. ''The North Vietnamese army totally sacrificed the southern fighters, destroyed what you called the Viet Cong.''
From mid-1968, Hanoi took full and detailed control of the war, and of the victory. The next three offensives - at Easter 1972, in the final 55-day conquest of Saigon and South Vietnam in March and April of 1975, and in January 1979 to defeat the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - were traditional military campaigns. They were planned, led and fought by the uniformed, mainstream army of North Vietnam.
As of March 1968, the Viet Cong were utterly defeated. The southern communists never played an important role in any battle again, and North Vietnam subsumed the South within months of the April 30, 1975 capture of Saigon, which was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
But the importance of the Tet offensive was not the military result. Even the North Vietnamese participants lost every battle of the Tet offensive and failed to spark a popular uprising. But they then went on to win the war. Vietnam's top living war veteran, Gen Vo Nguyen Giap, says the battlefield was a lot wider than Vietnam, and ''the most important [war front] was American public opinion''.
Few doubt that. The Tet offensive turned the mainstream media against the war, invigorated the so-called anti-war movement, and ultimately forced the withdrawal of all American combat forces within three years. It took another four years for the communists to achieve victory, but no journalist or historian doubts that the Tet offensive was the most significant turning point of the entire war.
The Tet offensive is history, but hugely relevant in today's world.
Arguably, civilised society is more sensitive about war casualties. But its enemies are more callous about suicide missions and mass civilian casualties than during the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. International terrorists are openly and aggressively talking about just such a campaign. Analogies are useful: Terrorism is the overall war; the attacks on the United States in 2001 were a sneaky surprise like Pearl Harbour, and the massive, coordinated strikes on separate targets is to be al-Qaeda's Tet offensive.
The highly respected US military analyst Colonel Austin Bay recently got a ripple of attention by his stark prediction: ''Sometime within the next six months or so, al-Qaeda or Saddam's terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive.''
But Col Bay wrote that the battle would be as isolated as the Tet offensive, and limited to a single country. It ''would feature simultaneous terror strikes in every major Iraqi city [which] would inflict hideous civilian casualties''.
There is strong evidence that this is a tremendously humble and unimaginative forecast about a seething, suicidal and certainly energetic enemy.
For example, in a recent, 30-day internet blitz, jihadist supporters worldwide were encouraged to ask questions of the No. 2 al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Egyptian doctor seemed clearly out of his league in cyberspace and current Islamist opinion. In those worlds, there is a clear desire - aching need, really - for a Tet offensive.
Why hasn't al-Qaeda begun operations in Palestine? Why isn't al-Qaeda operating in Iran? Why doesn't al-Qaeda open a front in Egypt? Why are the Jews in the world not struck, in Israel and the US? We want to act in (Syria and Lebanon) and we are ready to do so.
In one of his rambling, defensive replies, the befuddled Zawahiri tries to answer dozens of these questions at once: ''We will not abandon Andalucia, Sebta, Melilla [Spanish possessions claimed by Morocco], Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Haifa, Um Rashrash [Eliat, Israel], Baghdad, Kabul, and Kashmir and Grozny.''
The public call of the new Africa-based terrorist subsidiary Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is to spread attacks across borders in northern Africa, into Spain and - especially - France.
Zawahiri's feeble response never would have been tolerated by Gen Giap. Yet, al-Qaeda arguably has displayed a new tendency. It seems clearly to be adopting the main theme of Vietnam's Tet offensive by going after public opinion by using internet propaganda. It also is reversing the Vietnamese standard of top-down planning and direction, by trying to turn Islamist terror into a true people's war, ordered and organised from the bottom up.
A current Vietnamese army analyst and professor, Lt-Gen Nguyen Dinh Uoc, wrote in the official Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan this week that: ''The US forces were completely surprised, regardless of their large intelligence units, by three decisive factors: new forms of attack and directions, the good timing and well-organised preparations.'' A seminar in Ho Chi Minh City last week also emphasised the ''clear-sighted, independent and self-reliant military line'' of the Tet offensive.
Clearly there will be more ''Tet offensives'', and probably one by international terrorist gangs. But there should now be a difference. The first Tet offensive was a surprise; no future Tet offensive should have that advantage.
The writer covered the Tet offensive and Vietnam War from Saigon.
1 comment:
Warfare is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
Your article is very well done, a good read.
Post a Comment