The ghost of William Westmoreland, the U.S. general in charge of operations in the Vietnam War, lives on in Pete Hegseth, current U.S. Secretary of Defense/War. Every time I watch Hegseth give a press conference updating us on how things are going in our attack on Iran, I hear statistics that don’t seem to be borne out by coverage on the evening news. Specifically, Hegseth continuously maintains that Iran’s missile and drone attacks on U.S. assets and our allies are down 87 percent, oops, or was it 93 percent?
Westmoreland, if you were around in those days, was famous for his “body counts” of dead Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. The underlying assumption was that North Vietnam would eventually reach a point where it could no longer mount a large enough offensive because it would run out of men, women, and children (ugly, but true) to fight its war. Problem was, these body counts were either completely inflated or totally fabricated, take your pick.
The North’s massive Tet Offensive of 1968, though its forces lost, put the lie to U.S. assertions that the North’s forces had been decimated, and public opinion shifted totally against the war, bringing about Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election as president.
CBS eventually aired a post-Vietnam documentary detailing the Westmoreland body count fabrications. Westmoreland sued for $120 million in damages, but unfortunately, matters never got to court. Instead, both sides settled privately. So we’ll never know the grisly details of war propaganda.
Has there been a Tet equivalent in Iran yet? The country is certainly trying. Its missile attack on Diego Garcia put the lie to U.S. assertions that Iran’s missiles could travel no more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles), since Diego Garcia lies 2,400 miles away in the Indian Ocean.
Now even European cities seem within range of Iranian missiles, even if they have to reduce the payload and accept distance over accuracy.
President Trump, of course, already declared Iran 100 percent defeated a week ago, but now that they’ve flexed their muscles over controlling the Strait of Hormuz, that assessment seems straight out of the Westmoreland playbook. If he could run again for president, Trump would now be facing his LBJ moment. The war – plus the issues of affordability and ICE — have probably already sunk GOP hopes in the midterms.
End the war now, Mr. Trump, if you hope to be succeeded by a Republican in the White House in 2029. Iran’s Tet is just around the corner, and if you listen to European and Asian assessments, it has already been achieved.
[PICTURED: General William Westmoreland giving an assessment of how things are going in the Vietnam War]
