The Ramadan attacks against the Coalition Forces and the humanitarian organizations helping bring to life a Free Iraq are calling forth all kinds of comparisons with Vietnam. References are starting to show up in the papers to what became known as the Tet Offensive. This was a series of attacks by the communist forces, which took place in January 1968 during the Vietnamese holiday of Tet. One of the central elements of the Tet story is that in a military sense it was a terrible defeat for the enemy, which lost over a month more than 43,000 of its troops, 10 times the number of American, Australian and Korean soldiers slain by the communists.

On the political battlefield, however, there are many who call Tet a victory for the communists, for it rattled the confidence of the American intelligentsia and political leadership. The smell of cordite was still on the battlefield when the New York Times precipitated one of the most energetic two weeks of editorial hand-wringing in the history of newspapers. The Times was not alone, but it was certainly emphatic. One day it spoke of “painful proof” of the limitations of American power, the next of “stunning communist successes.” Two days later it editorialized about the “spectacularly successful Communist Tet offensive.” Before a week had passed it was plumping for a negotiated settlement of the war.

No doubt this is exactly the kind of impact our enemies in Iraq are hoping to achieve with the attacks they are launching in the Sunni Triangle over Ramadan. Never mind that the attacks have wreaked nothing like the casualties our side sustained during Tet, when more than 1,500 American, Korean and Australian forces were killed and more than 2,700 South Vietnamese were killed. No one minimizes the death of even one soldier, but in the entire Battle of Iraq so far, American forces and our allies have sustained fewer than a tenth the casualties we took in Tet. Yet already the attacks are starting to rattle at least some sectors of the political debate in the country.

Senator McCain is starting to chide the president, using a Vietnam analogy. The Reverend Sharpton, of course, is doing the same. Senator Kerry is trying to assert that he has a better perspective on things because he had “the experience of being one of those troops on the front lines when the policy has gone wrong.” Senator Lieberman is using some Vietnam analogies, though not as egregiously as his fellow Democrats. Senator Graham, though out of the race, has been likening Iraq to Vietnam, and, most stridently, Governor Dean, the former Vermont executive, has been drawing the Vietnam parallel, including comments just the other day when he said the American people weren’t told the truth about Vietnam “and it was a disaster. And Iraq is going to become a disaster under this presidency.”

It’s a time to remember that there were, and still are, those who did not react to Tet and the other bloodlettings in Vietnam the way the communists wanted. And there are those who reckon that even though America lost the Vietnam War on the home front it was but a battle in a larger war — the struggle for the future of Asia, for the Free World triumph in the Cold War. The victories of democracy in Asia ennoble all the sacrifice of by American GIs and their allies in Vietnam and vice versa. The American victory in the Cold War could not have happened without Vietnam, in the view of many. While Tet may have seemed a stunning success to some at the time, it looks quite different from the perspective of history. So enemy planners lunging for a Tetlike transformation of the struggle may yet find that Americans have learned a thing or two in the last 35 years.