Basra Battles Echo Vietnam's Tet Offensive -- Will We Ever Learn History's Lessons?

One battle rarely wins or loses a war, at least in the moment. Gettysburg crippled Lee’s army in 1863, but the Confederates fought on until 1865. Stalingrad broke the back of the German 6th Army, but it would be two-and-a-half years before the Russians took Berlin. War – particularly the modern variety – is a complex mixture of tactics, technology, and politics. Then there are the intangibles, like morale.

But while a single battle may not end a conflict, it can illuminate an underlying reality. This reality generally gets lost in the thunder of propaganda, illusion, and wishful thinking that always accompanies the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Now that some of the dust has settled over the recent battle of Basra that pitted Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army against the armies of the United States and Iraq, it is time to examine what that clash meant, and what are some analogies that might help bring it into focus. There were certainly echoes of Vietnam in last month’s fighting, and some of those parallels, particularly to the 1968 Tet offensive, are worth a closer look.

Remembering Tet

As Frank Rich pointed out in The New York Times, there was indeed a whiff of Tet in the debacle in Basra. Just before the 1968 attack, U.S. General William Westmoreland made his historic “light at the end of the tunnel” prediction. In recent testimony before the Senate, General David Petraeus said the United States was making “significant” progress in Iraq, and his spokesman, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, bragged that the United States had the Mahdi army on the ropes: “We’ve degraded their capability.”

“There is a parallel to Tet here,” says military historian Jack Radey. “’We have won the war, violence is down, the surge works’ [the U.S. told itself], and then Kaboom! The Green Zone is taking incoming.”

Radey argues that the American “victories” against the Vietnamese in the period leading up to the Tet offensive were an illusion. “If the enemy seems to be missing from the picture, this is not proof you have wiped him out,” he says. “It is more likely proof that you have lost track of him, and he will, at his own chosen time, find ways to remind you of his presence.”

Which is exactly what Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army did.

According to historian Gareth Porter, the United States mistakenly concluded that the ceasefire Sadr declared six months ago was a sign that the Mahdi army was vulnerable. When the Americans began attacking Sadr strongholds – more than 2,000 militia members and leaders have been arrested since last July’s truce – and the Mahdi army did not react, the United States was convinced that the militia was weak.

Other Analogies

But Tet is not the only relevant Vietnam analogy. The other parallel was Operation Lam Son, the 1971 invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). The United States pushed South Vietnam to attack Laos in order to demonstrate that the ARVN could stand on its own two feet, and to make the point prior to the upcoming 1972 U.S. elections that Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization” was working

Instead, U.S. audiences watched as panicked ARVN troops clung to helicopter landing skids in their desperation to escape from Laos. Lam Son “was a disaster,” writes historian A.J. Langguth in Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975: “Vietnamization became one more doomed fantasy. After 10 years of training and costly equipment, South Vietnam’s troops seemed to be no match for the Communists.”

Radey says the Lam Son analogy is a useful one. The invasion didn’t work “because the [ARVN] soldiers didn’t believe in the cause they fought for,” while their opponents, with far less fire power, “believed in what they were doing. Vive la difference.”