This is Tet?
This is Tet?:
Eleven more U.S. troops were slain in combat, the military said Wednesday, putting October on track to be the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the siege of Fallujah nearly two years ago.
The military says the sharp increase in U.S. casualties _ 70 so far this month _ is tied to Ramadan and a security crackdown that has left American forces more vulnerable to attack in Baghdad and its suburbs. Muslim tenets hold that fighting a foreign occupation force during Islam's holy month puts a believer especially close to God.
Who is talking about Tet, you say? One milblogger in particular anyway:
He merely agreed that there was an appropriate comparison to be made between the Tet offensive and the violence we are seeing in Iraq today. I agree.
Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush "accepts" the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not "accepting" that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists.
70 KIA in a month? US commanders would have loved to lose as few as 70 soldiers a day in 1968...
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