When I heard about the recent uprisings in Iraq, I immediately thought of the Tet offensive — which I only recently learned was “a battlefield disaster for the North Vietnamese but a media (and hence political) victory.” (They didn’t teach it that way in high school.) In Fallujah Islamo-fascists Meet The Marines, Austin Bay makes the same point:
The Fallujah fascists and al-Sadr think they can defeat or at least deflect America by causing U.S. casualties, then parading the bodies before Peter Jennings and Al Jazeera. Al-Sadr adds another wrinkle: multiple ‘hotspots’ to seed the impression of broad insurrection. It’s a clever gambit, staging gunfights in Basra, Kut and Baghdad, and leverages contemporary cable Tv’s appetite for 24-7 repetition and magnification. The goal is a ‘Tet effect,’ an echo of North Vietnam’s 1968 offensive, which was a battlefield disaster for the North Vietnamese but a media (and hence political) victory.