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Interview: Oberdorfer: Tet and Iraq: Parallels and Differences

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor
Interviewee: Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

October 23, 2006

Don Oberdorfer, an expert on Asian affairs who wrote a major book on the Tet Offensive and its political aftermath in the United States, Tet! The Turning Point in the Vietnam War, says even though support for the Iraq war is ebbing in the United States, the current mood lacks “the domestic passion” the Tet offensive produced against the Vietnam War in 1968 that led President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek reelection.

Oberdorfer says that so far in Iraq, there has been no “shock” similar to the surprise attack the Communist forces were able to create in 1968, the American public is not being asked to pay higher taxes, and there is no military draft. “If the Iraq war actually cost people money instead of just adding to the national deficit, then there’d be people in the street protesting,” he says. “And if people were being drafted to go to Iraq, I think there would be a very different domestic feeling about the war.”

In recent days there’s been comparisons in the press—and, in fact, President Bush referred to it himself—between the situation today in Iraq and the situation in 1968 following the major offensive in Vietnam by Communist forces during the Tet holiday period which led eventually to President Lyndon B. Johnson announcing two months later that he would not run for reelection that year. Since you’re the author of Tet!, a major book on that period, can you describe for us what the mood was like then and what the results of Tet actually were?

It’s an interesting comparison, but of course historical comparisons are never precise and sometimes they’re misleading.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.