Rumors of Tet Are Premature

But that won't stop the MSM from trying, according to National Review:

The terrorists have long studied how our media operates. Check out an August 2006 jihadist chat room post by Najd al-Rawi of the Global Islamic Media Front entitled "The Global Media: A Work Paper for Invading the US Media.” Ironically, among the people the insurgents seek to influence, al-Rawi lists “well-known American writers such as [Thomas] Friedman.” I am not saying Friedman is complicit in some kind of terror plot; I am saying the terrorists know how writers generate story lines, and they seek to provide the hooks. Nevertheless, it doesn’t always work. Recently an insurgent group release a video of (they claimed) the bodies of American servicemen being dragged through the streets. Shades of Mogadishu 1994? It was clearly an attempt to evoke that event and the withdrawal that followed, but the manipulation was a little too obvious and it did not catch on.

Another and more fitting attempt at engaging the media’s propensity for seeking Vietnam analogies was the planned attack last spring on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. (See my original piece on it here . ) Nothing would get the Tet comparison going better than an embassy attack, since during the actual Tet offensive the poorly planned, ineffectively executed and quickly dispatched strike on the Saigon embassy was immediately dubbed a “symbolic victory” for the enemy by the American media. A similar attack in Baghdad would also not have to achieve anything to enjoy the same decisive status.

What gets me is, it doesn't seem to bother the Press they are being played like a fiddle, sometimes by the administration, and usually by the enemy. Reminds you of a loose woman who doesn't care who they sleep with.

Renowned military historian John Keegan weighs in declaring Iraq is not Vietnam:

By January 1968, total American casualties in Vietnam — killed, wounded and missing — had reached 80,000 and climbing. Eventually deaths in combat and from other causes would exceed 50,000, of which 36,000 were killed in action. Casualties in Iraq are nowhere near those figures. In a bad week in Vietnam, the US could suffer 2,000 casualties. Since 2003, American forces in Iraq have never suffered as many as 500 casualties a month. The number of casualties inflicted in Iraq are not established, but are under 50,000. In any year of the Vietnam war, the communist party of North Vietnam sent 200,000 young men to the battlefields in the south, most of whom did not return. Vietnam was one of the largest and costliest wars in history. The insurgency in Iraq resembles one of the colonial disturbances of imperial history.

If you really think about this, compared to other wars in America's history, the Civil War, WW 2, Iraq is much ado about nothing. Any death is regrettable, but our country use to think freedom was worth fighting for.