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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Oct-06
President Bush's reference to Vietnam War "Tet Offensive" has journalists in a tizzy

Web Log - October, 2006

President Bush's reference to Vietnam War "Tet Offensive" has journalists in a tizzy

Airhead journalists have completely missed the point, and the real danger.

President Bush

President Bush

Journalists were excited all day saying that President Bush "admitted" that the current rise in violence in Iraq may be similar the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War.

The Independent, for example, said in what was supposed to be a news story, "The allusion to the Tet Offensive was a real departure for Mr Bush, who hitherto refused to accept any similarities between Iraq and the war in Vietnam, which lasted eight years and claimed more than 55,000 American lives."

I feel pretty confident that the story author, Rupert Cornwell, has no idea what the Tet Offensive was. This reflects the general level of ignorance exhibited by journalists, something I've commented on frequently, especially with respect to economics and global finance, and the willingness of most reporters today to say the stupidest things they can to support their political beliefs.

Here's what President Bush actually said in the ABC News interview, when asked whether he agreed with the opinion that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago. "He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election." When asked what his "gut" tells him he said, "George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave. And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here's how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw." Bush added that there wouldn't be a withdrawal before the end of his Presidency.

In other words, Bush was criticizing those who are calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, not because America was losing, but because al-Qaeda is "trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave." He was indirectly criticizing the press for supporting al-Qaeda. In other words, he wasn't saying "We're losing in Iraq like we did in Vietnam"; he was saying, "We're not losing in Iraq, and we're not going to just leave like we did in Vietnam."

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, both pro-Bush and anti-Bush pundits are completely misreading the situation, and the significance of the Tet Offensive. So let's review.

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The Tet Offensive occurred in January 1968, while Lyndon Johnson was President. The Vietnam War really was a civil war (unlike the current war in Iraq), fought along historical fault lines separating indigenous peoples in South and North Vietnam, respectively.

South Vietnam had historically aligned with the West, thanks to a century of French occupation and control. North Vietnam was aligned with Communist China. Thanks to the Truman Doctrine, when President John Kennedy took office in 1960, he decided that Communism had to be stopped at the South Vietnamese border. He began increasing American involvement during his term. After he was assassinated, President Johnson continued increasing American forces.

America at that time was in a generational Awakening era, and the anti-war movement was fierce, especially among college students. Anti-war riots and demonstrations occurred on campuses around the country on almost a weekly basis, and in the summer of 1967, thousands of anti-war students converged in San Francisco to celebrate the Summer of Love.

In this climate, President Johnson's administration was constantly on the political defensive, but promises of "light at the end of the tunnel" seemed to keep most voters in line.

Then the North Vietnamese made an explosive military move during the January 1968 Tet holiday. (Tet is the Vietnamese new year.) They attacked American and South Vietnamese forces in coordinated attacks in dozens of cities simultaneously. They caught the US forces by surprise.

Nonetheless, the US forces repelled the attacks. The Tet Offensive was a total military disaster for the North Vietnamese.

But it was total political victory for the North Vietnamese. The media called it a military victory for the North Vietnamese, which it wasn't. CBS newsman Walter Cronkite said that the U.S. was "mired in a stalemate" and called for a negotiated end to the conflict.

Cronkite's report was especially a political disaster for President Johnson. 1968 was an election year, and his poll results started falling dramatically. In March 1968, a distraught President Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election.

This is the moment that today's journalists wish to re-create. That's why they want to call the Iraq war a civil war (so it would be like Vietnam). That's why they use words like "quagmire" and "stalemate," hoping to turn the American public against the war. That's why journalists are so overwhelmingly opposed to Bush, hoping to repeat their 1968 victory.

But things are very different today. As I've been saying for years, there's no anti-war movement in America today. There are no riots and demonstrations on college campuses. No Democrats, except those farthest on the left, are calling for a withdrawal or for negotiation with al-Qaeda. In fact, nobody is offering any realistic proposal for ending the war in Iraq.

OK, so political events can't be predicted because they're chaotic events (in the sense of Chaos Theory), but it's very unlikely that the current rising violence in Iraq will have anything remotely like the same effect that the Tet Offensive. We're in a generational crisis era now, not an awakening era, so the rules are completely changed. This means that the dreams and fantasies of the journalists who are hoping to bring about this result are going to have their dreams crushed.

So let's leave politics aside, and do a Generational Dynamics analysis of the war itself. What does the current increase in violence mean to the war?

To explain this, we're going to compare the Iraq war to two other wars: the Vietnam war, of course, and also the recent war between Israel and Lebanon.

Let's start with the Lebanon war.

Recall that when I wrote about the winners and losers of the Lebanese war, I contrasted the war styles of the two parties.

Israel fought in a typical crisis era "hot" war style, furiously bombing infrastructure, calling up new reserves every day, confronting Hizbollah terrorists on their own soil, and feeling very anxious about the U.N. peace deal after the war.

If Hizbollah had fought in a "hot" style, they would have crossed the border into Israel and killed Israelis in their own homes.

Instead, Hizbollah fought the war in a "cool," methodical non-crisis war style. They launched missiles from their home soil, retreating to their homes or to bunkers as needed. They methodically goaded Israeli into supplanting their air-only war with a ground war, requiring thousands of Israeli soldiers to fight on Lebanese soil. The goaded the Israelis into destroying Lebanese infrastructure, and killing Lebanese civilians, including women and children.

The reasons for these differences in style are that Israel is in a generational crisis era, while Lebanon (along with Hizbollah) is in a generational awakening era. This difference between "hot" and "cool" styles is typical of countries in these two different eras.

Now let's turn to the Vietnam war and the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was, to say the least, a "hot" style. It was an enormously risky attack, and, in fact, it was a military disaster. In fact, the Vietnamese were in a generational crisis era at their time, their last crisis war having been fought against the French in the 1890s.

Militarily, North Vietnam should have lost the war after the Tet Offensive, but they won because America, in an awakening era, defeated itself politically.

OK, now let's return to the Iraq war. The increase in violence by a "Tet Offensive" style of fighting, if that's really true, is obviously extremely aggressively -- definitely a "hot" war style.

But Iraq is in a generational awakening era. So how could it be a "hot" war style?

I won't explain again what I've explained many, many times, why a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is impossible. A civil war must be an extremely energetic, genocidal effort, such as is going on in Darfur at the present time, and that's impossible in an awakening era. There's a lot of violence going on in Iraq, but not the genocidal violence going on in Darfar.

This is how I can be so sure that the source of any really genocidal violence is from outside Iraq. The most murderous and violent of the belligerents, the suicide bombers, are known to be 95-100% foreigners, from Saudi Arabia or Jordan mostly. If there were a civil war going on, why would they need outsiders to conduct suicide bombings?

Some percentage of the Sunnis and Shiites are Iraqi people, but from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, it's not possible that these people could be generating this kind of violence.

If, as the gleeful journalists claim, the current surge in violence is like the Tet Offensive, then it means that the regional war is beginning to take hold.

This is what I wrote in August 2003, as the terrorist bombings began:

"The really dangerous scenario is that large numbers of Palestinian and "mujahadeen" terrorists will be motivated by identity group relationships to move into Iraq as a theatre of war against the Americans. That isn't happening now, but it's one of several possible scenarios that may unfold in the Mideast region during the next few months and years."

If the violence is increasing as it did with the Tet Offensive, then from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, this is what it must mean. Iraq is increasingly becoming a theatre of war.

The analysis of what's going on in Iraq has been really difficult, and I've been struggling with it and trying to refine it as time has gone on. What makes it difficult is that there are so many things going on at the same thing, and the news reports treat them all equally. If there were a news report of a Sunni village and a Shiite village massacring each other, that would be a genocidal style of war, but we never hear anything like that. What we hear about are bombings that may kill people, but are not the close combat genocidal violence that occurs in crisis wars. The militia battles that occur in Iraq do not appear to be massacres that would indicate a crisis war; instead, they appear to be brief actions in support of political objects, and that would indicate a non-crisis war battle.

The real war will be in the countries that are in or entering generation crisis eras -- Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and others. Iraqis will not want any part of the war, having just survived the genocidal Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, but Iraq will increasingly be a theatre of war, as the "clash of civilizations" world war approaches.

I started out this essay by criticizing journalist Rupert Cornwell for saying stupid things. Let me finish up by commenting on some of the other pundits' statements I've heard and read today:

If it hadn't been for Walter Cronkite, we would have won the Vietnam War.
No. America was in an awakening era, and we would have lost the war politically, even without Walter Cronkite.

If George Bush hadn't been President, we wouldn't be at war with Iraq.
No. If Al Gore had been President after 9/11, the ground war would have begun in his administration as well, and we'd be in exactly the same place today. Remember that Iraq war actually began in 1991, not 2003, and escalated in 1999 in the Clinton Administration. President Gore would have continued that policy.

If it weren't for Iraq, Bush's approval rating would be very high.
No. During generational crisis eras, the political fighting is always extremely bitter. It was during America's two previous crisis periods, and the vitriolic attacks on George Bush are no worse than those directed at President Franklin Roosevelt or President Abraham Lincoln.

The economy is strong, so the Republicans should do well in the mid-term elections.
No. It's a bubble economy, and the bubble could burst at any time with a panic. Right now it appears that the Democrats will have a major victory, but if I have any misgivings about that expectation, it's because it's so widely believed by the airhead press, and those airheads are wrong more often than they're right.

Gas prices are back down.
Sure. Oil used to sell for $30 a barrel a few years ago. A few weeks ago it was selling at $76 per barrel. Now it's back down to $60 a barrel, but that's still twice as much as it sold for previously.
Still, the commodities bubble still appears to be deflating, and if there's a worldwide financial crisis, then the price of oil and gas should come way down, since no one will have any money to pay for it.

Al-Qaeda is on the run.
No. Al-Qaeda is getting stronger, and according to a report in the Guardian, the UK is al-Qaeda's number one target. The UK is a much easier target than the US because tens of thousands of British citizens visit Pakistan each year, and that provides al-Qaeda with plenty of opportunity to build up cells like the one that perpetrated the July 7 London subway bombings last year.
Al-Qaeda will continue to get stronger until the "clash of civilizations" world war begins, and then it's anyone's guess how things will go.

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Oct-06 President Bush's reference to Vietnam War "Tet Offensive" has journalists in a tizzy

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Oct-06
President Bush's reference to Vietnam War "Tet Offensive" has journalists in a tizzy