What we should remember about 1968

Robert McFarlane:

Thirty-nine years ago, halfway through my second tour in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, who were soundly defeated on the battlefield. Two measures of that battle--both relevant to the situation in Iraq today--stand out for me. The first relates to an important lesson U.S. forces had learned after three years of conflict: the vital role of "winning hearts and minds" of the local population. The second concerns the power of the press to affect our ability to sustain violent warfare.

Concerning the first of these, by early 1968 Marines had conceived a plan for building mutual trust and respect among villagers in Northern I Corps built around the deployment of platoon-sized units that lived and worked each day with local Vietnamese peasants with no greater mission than to "make life better."

Each of these Combined Action Platoons (or CAPs as they were called) included a medic qualified to carry out "well checks"--including inoculations and treatment of minor maladies--as well as assistance with securing hospital care if needed for the families in each village. An engineer was also often sent along to organize repairs of fragile dwellings, drill wells, help organize perimeter fortifications, and to undertake a hundred other utilitarian tasks.

The results from launching the CAP program were enormous and measurable. Probably the most significant return from the good will earned by these enlisted Marines was the increasing yield in tactical intelligence. Specifically, throughout the weeklong Tet offensive in early 1968 not one village in which a CAP was deployed fell to the enemy.

Yet the press--notwithstanding the defeat of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong on the battlefield and the complete failure of the enemy to provoke an uprising and rallying of southerners to their cause--portrayed U.S. forces as having been surprised, bloodied and having suffered a resounding defeat. That misrepresentation had a powerful effect in Washington and in our body politic. Support for the war, already declining, unraveled at an accelerating pace.

...

Today, four years into the war in Iraq, we've come full circle to the point reached 40 years ago--unfortunately in both respects. On the one hand we've found military leaders--men such as Army Gen. David Petraeus and Marine Lt. Gen. Jim Mattis--with a solid grasp of what is needed to turn the military tide, and who are managing that task with early evidence of success. More money is going into winning hearts and minds. More resources are being devoted to quality of life fixes that are visible to Iraqis. Shuttered factories are being opened in a major new program launched by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England and headed by his subordinate Paul Brinkley. A major agricultural program is about to be launched in Anbar province, again under Pentagon leadership.

The truly good news is that the results are being felt. Sheiks and tribal leaders watching the changes being made in Anbar are coming our way, and offering various kinds of support to help root out al Qaeda and deal with the insurgents. Yet news of these successes is very hard to find in our mainstream media. It's February '68 redux--with far greater consequences I fear.

...

Some in the media have noticed the success. Others continue their gloomy vision. Right now it is the politicians in Congress who are ignoring the changes in Iraq. They are locked into last year's war. It is in Congress will this war is likely to be lost. Democrats continue to put out the bogus assertion that they have a mandate for defeat in Iraq. Republicans fight back to buy time for our forces in Iraq, but they do not fight hard enough to discredit the Democrat vision of warfare.