A few nights ago I was sitting up late and watching as news came in of five rapid suicide bombings in Iraq. A single word sprung into my mind: Tet. It was, after all, the first day of Ramadan, a Sunday (attacks in Iraq traditionally fall on Sunday or Monday, with the orders for the attack being issued after Friday prayers and Saturday being taken for preparation), and, in general, an excellent time to launch a massive counter-offensive against Coalition forces. Thankfully it didn’t come that day. But it will come.

One of these days, the enemy forces in Iraq will get lucky and strike a real blow against American forces. I don’t know in what form that blow will fall: a massive bombing like in Lebanon, a deadly, pitched battle like in Mogadishu, the assassination of a major figure, the killing of a large number of Iraqi civilians, or something else altogether. It could even be (though I doubt it) an actual attempted uprising such as the North Vietnamese orchestrated in 1968. In any case, it will be ugly and brutal. Though it is not of the military aspects of which I wish to speak here.

I begin to think that those who call this war “another Vietnam� are right. Not, of course, in the way they mean it, but I think that they are right nonetheless. This is a war in which a sizable and influential percentage of the population are on the side of the enemy. They might claim to be ‘concerned’ about the war for any number of reasons (cost, Moslem anger, the UN, the French, etc, etc, etc) but, fundamentally, they wish for the United States to lose the war. They claim that their desires are honourable and within the bounds of acceptable political thought. They are neither. What they call ‘dissent’ is, in all actuality, treason.

The Tet Offensive was significant militarily, but not for the reasons generally believed by the public. Rather than being an American military defeat, Tet was a great tactical victory. US and South Vietnamese forces smashed the Viet Cong. Thereafter, VC units were limited mostly to auxiliary missions while the main battle was taken over by North Vietnamese regulars.

Yet Tet was still an American defeat: a strategic one. The coverage of Tet by the media created the widespread impression that the United States was losing (and could not win) the war. While this impression was generally at odds with the facts of the matter, it stuck. There is the same danger in Iraq.

The lessons which have been taken from Vietnam by many, I think, are mostly wrong. Yes, civilian interference in military affairs can be dangerous: but so can a lack of civilian control. Yes, it is important to have a total commitment to any conflict: but not every small war is a potential Vietnam. The one thing which people got right out of Vietnam was the idea that the press cannot be simply given free reign in a war zone.

Fundamentally, the real lesson of Vietnam (for both Americans and our enemies) is this: while American forces cannot be defeated on the battlefield, the American nation can be defeated at home. During Vietnam it was said that the war was being fought so that a later war would not have to be fought on the streets of New York. Ironically, the streets of New York and America’s other great cities are exactly where that war was lost. Vietnam wasn’t lost because of Westmoreland and the other Generals at MACV (though, of course, they could have done better): it was lost by Walter Cronkite in the CBS newsroom.

On the battlefield, modern American armies are invincible against any force possessed by their enemies. In a pitched battle, virtually all of the armies of the world would be destroyed by a single American Division. Those few nations with larger military establishments could defeat an American force only through the sacrifice of large portions of their military establishment. During the Korean War, the People’s Liberation Army lost nearly 25,000 men while trying to destroy the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir (the Marine losses numbered less than a thousand). In a similar battle today I would expect to see similar results. The only Armies in the world which would have even a hope against their American counterparts in an equal fight (those, perhaps, of Israel, Britain, and Japan) are utterly unlikely to ever meet their American brothers upon the field of battle.

Therefore, the enemy is left with a single option: they must win the war off the battlefield. They must take advantage of American freedoms and court the support of the large and growing class of traitors with more attachment to ideology than to country. It worked in Vietnam: in the end the greatest ally that the North Vietnamese had was not the Soviet Union, but the leftist wing of the Democratic Party. The Soviet Union gave them enough weapons to survive: the leftists won the war for them by fighting against the war effort with all of their might.

This is a war for national survival. The enemy which the Coalition is confronting in Iraq holds genocide and world conquest as its ultimate goal. The Battle of Iraq is but a single front in the War on Terrorism, the Third World War. This is all one war with one enemy. The Iraqi Ba’athist, the Taliban hold-out, the al-Qaeda terrorist, the Hamas planner, the Syrian politician, the Iranian Mullah, the North Korean nuclear scientist: these are not distinct and independent enemies. They are part of a network of terror, an axis of evil which menaces the world. There is only one war and there is only one enemy. Whatever differences exist between these groups (and there are many) are subordinated by the goal of the destruction of America. Whatever wicked goals that these individuals and their leaders wish to pursue will be frustrated until America is finished off and shoved out of the picture.

President Bush set exactly the right tone when, in September of 2001, he warned the world that they were either with us or with the terrorists. The same must go for the American left: just whose side are they on?

We know whose side they were in Vietnam. They proclaimed in loudly, they flew VC flags, they flew on over to have their picture taken shooting at American planes. Whose side are they on this time?

While it is mostly forgotten today, there was a ‘peace’ movement during the Civil War as well. The Copperheads (as anti-war Northern Democrats came to be known) opposed the war, opposed emancipation, and favored a negotiated peace with the South. Lincoln had many of them thrown in jail. In a war of national survival, there is no room for ‘dissent’ when ‘dissent’ is code for sympathy with the enemy.

While it is unlikely that President Bush will ever suspend habeas corpus and order the present crop of traitors clamped in jail for the duration, it is important that we fight back against them harder than we ever did during Vietnam.

That war could have been won. American, South Vietnamese, Australian, and South Korean forces won it with their blood. It was not lost because the enemy was superior in the field of arms: it was lost because American traitors, acting reasons that are their own, stabbed their country and their ally in the back. And, lest we forget, it could happen again.