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One of the problems that we faced in Vietnam - indeed, that the Western mind always seems to face, is its "reliance" on history. Put another way, we're always fighting the last war rather than attending to the singularity of the current war, at least for the first few years. This is a bit like the French building the Maginot Line, a remarkably effective obstacle for static trench warfare, but utterly useless against highly mobile units. In Vietnam, we tended to conceive of the war in terms of "ground" or "territory," pretending that it was Korea, or even Europe, hence the absurdities of the mythical "DMZ, and atrocities like the various A Shau Valley campaigns of 1969 ("Hamburger Hill" being the most flagrant stupidity of the territory mistake). And so again, in Iraq, even critics like to think the war in terms of Vietnam. It's not Vietnam. It just isn't. The OP recognizes this by asking us to transform Tet for the singularoty of the Iraqi occasion. This still falls short.
The Tet Offensive was not merely a strategic move. It was the manifestation of a distinct political philosophy. The Vietnamese Communists were doctrinaire dialectical materialists. That is to say, they believed in the progression of the dialectic in material events and processes. Hence, you get General Giap's famous concept of People's War, a dialectical materialist formulation of first order, proceeding in stages through struggle and contradiction. Tet was formulated when "conditions were historically ripe," in the classic materialist dialectic. It cannot be understood outside this conceptual framework.
The Islamic political philosophy operates much differently. There is no progression through stages, with each stage building on and incorporating the last, but rather steady repetition - even pure repetition, cyclical and monotonous, like the daily prayer. In this sense, Westerners better understand even the Vietnamese communist thought than the Iraqi insurgent thought, since Western thought itself is steeped in the notion of "historical progression." (As a side note, Vietnamese thought itself had to bend to the essentially Western dialectical materialism, and often never did; peasants especially in the south retained the Buddhist worldview of repetition, which was more troubling for US strategy than the more understandable People's War.) So, what's the upshot? An event like a Tet, an event that's conceived and executed as a stage in a historical progression, could not happen in Iraq. Our fate there is far worse:no progression (this is why reports of "steady progress" are now so laughable), no "big event" to latch on to, nothing. Just repetition. And it may be that repetition is the only "Tet" that the Iraqi insurgents need, since it is far more intolerable to the American temperament than is the steady movement toward a big event.
We have to start thinking differently. You ask what will "Tet" look like in Iraq. My response is simple: the kind of Tet that we're going to see in Iraq has been going on for four plus years, Tet in slow motion, tantric Tet, with not even the excited satisfaction of the money shot.
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