To mark the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Têt Offensive, CounterPunch will serialize Wilfred Burchett’s Vietnam Will Win (Guardian Books, New York, 1968) over the next few weeks.

I graduated High School in 1970 and had very little political awareness of the American tragedy known as Vietnam in 1968. I read articles about the Tet Offensive and 1968 Democratic Convention in my local newspaper as well as sources like Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. In other words, I knew next to nothing about the real world. Even the brief summary provided by Counterpunch has already been enlightening.

Wilfred Burchett gives a sober and logical assessment based on several trips in the jungles of South Vietnam with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) and many visits to the North, to Hanoi under American bombs. He was on the spot, where the action was, talking to the right people: President Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, NLF President Nguyen Huu Tho and many others, NLF commanders, student activists, women revolutionaries and guerillas, intellectuals, religious leaders, peasants.

That is The Introduction from Counterpunch author George Burchett to The Introduction from the book and it asks a question that is still relevant to America's current global military atrocities:

So why did the Vietcong win? Why did Vietnam win?

So here's The Introduction to the book
by David Dellinger, where we discover that the exact same problems that plagued America then continue to plague us today:

It’s not just that the violence and hypocrisy of the United States in Vietnam, like fallout, cannot be confined within artificial national boundaries and not increasingly poison domestic affairs as well. It’s also a matter of recognizing that poisoned fruits do not grow, by accident, on healthy trees. The contempt for life, the flagrantly antidemocratic policies that have been made so clear to us in U.S. actions in Vietnam are seen to have their roots in domestic institutions and relationships.

More precisely:

Having seen the faces of napalmed and tortured Vietnamese, having experienced the insistence of the military industrial complex on continuing an unjustifiable and losing war which has already killed off more than 30,000 Americans, we have taken a fresh look at the liberal corporate economy at home. We are reexamining the system of “representative democracy” which assures the privileges and preserves the power of the power elite. We are questioning the relevance of an antiwar movement which has not faced up to the causes of war and has been insensitive to the daily institutionalized violence of America’s property relationships.

There is a brief and illuminating historical summary and analysis of the Paris Peace Talks that LBJ initiated in 1968:

The fact is that by May 1968, U.S. military-political strategies in Vietnam had been driven into bankruptcy. Even President Johnson realized that the 206,000 more troops demanded earner by Westmoreland could not change the situation. The Paris talks could serve as a means of diverting Public opinion from the real situation they could serve to gain time to develop new strategies and also to defuse the halt-the bombing, end-the war agitation inside and outside the United States

In spite of overwhelming military manpower and forces America was losing:

Even before the sharp rise in casualties from the Tet offensive on, announced U.S. casualties were running at a higher monthly average than during the Korean war and real casualties were known by correspondents on the spot to be far higher than those announced total official casualty figures exceeding those of the Korean war were released as the Paris talks ended their third month.

Massive bombardment:

U.S. planes were dropping a greater tonnage of bombs every month on North Vietnam than on Germany at the peak of World War II, a greater tonnage per year than the total dropped on North Korea during three years of war. (This latter was by no means negligible. It was enough to destroy every town, village, factory and virtually every building in North Korea except those that had been placed underground. )

And still America failed:

To fail against armed forces developed from peasant guerrillas, with an army of well over a million superbly armed troops at your disposal, plus the world’s most modern air force and unlimited artillery, is a failure of monumental dimensions.

If one were to add to the list a couple of generals relieved of their commands on the battlefield, others lolled or wounded in action, then the high-level casualty list becomes impressive. Especially when it is topped by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, whose nine visits to South Vietnam, each followed by optimistic “progress reports,” failed to produce any real changes in favor of the United States up to the time that President Johnson unceremoniously relieved him That other important heads would roll after the military-political disaster that the Tet offensive represented for U.S. strategies and prestige was certain. That Westmoreland would finally get his marching orders was a foregone conclusion. That the supreme commander-in-chief, President Johnson, would add his name to the casualty list could not have been foreseen. But there it is!

How come?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/02/vietnam-will-win-introduction/

(That article was from February 2nd. For purposes of brevity and clarity I'm going to end here and follow up with a post on the most recent Counterpunch article shortly)