Moving To Sustainment: Lessons Of The Tet Offensive

BEFORE the 30th anniversary of the Tet offensive fades into memory, it is regrettable that our nation still has not grasped the meaning of that pivotal battle of the Vietnam War.

The Tet offensive was about life-and-death questions: What's worth dying for? What's worth living for? The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong knew the answer, and changed the course of the war in one massive surprise attack. Like a half million other American servicemen who spent Jan. 31, 1968 and following days holed up in bunkers and billets as bullets whirled past our heads, I had time to ponder those questions.

Our presence in Vietnam was part of a Cold War based on the containment of communism. We made foreign-policy decisions - good ones and bad - on the basis of our opposition to communism. But Marxist ideology ceased to be a threat nearly a decade ago. America has failed to articulate a new rationale for its foreign policy.

It is time that we moved from a policy of containment to a policy of "sustainment." America must define its national interests based on sustaining human life, at home and abroad.

"Engagement" as a grand strategy cannot be viewed as a visionary and principle-based end commensurate with the values of our founding fathers. By definition, engagement can only be a means.

The Tet offensive caught America by surprise. Just six weeks earlier, Gen. William Westmoreland promised "light at the end of the tunnel." Certainly, those of us fighting the war in Vietnam never expected to see an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon or the North Vietnamese flag hoisted over Hue.

For the North Vietnamese, the Tet offensive was a psychological victory, not a military one. They threw everything they had into it. They suffered massive casualties in our counterattack. As William Manchester stated, Tet was "a psychological Pearl Harbor" for American citizens. Even though we were able to prevail militarily, we had lost the war because, back home, America lost the will to fight.

The North Vietnamese were willing to make great sacrifices because they knew what they were fighting for - their homeland. They had a perseverance forged from a long view of history: They had driven out the Chinese, the French and others. Despite an overwhelming disadvantage in military strength and technology, they could outlast the Americans, too.

And they did.

We disengaged from Southeast Asia - physically and psychologically - and began a retreat from the world. We also retreated from one of America's founding principles - respect for human life. We ignored genocide in Cambodia and our silence purchased complicity in the deaths of 2 million people under Pol Pot. We propped up dictators like Zaire's Mobutu Sese-Seko, who robbed us and his own people.

When we did stand up for sustainment of human life in Somalia, our commitment was short-lived: We left the day after television brought us grisly images of the deaths of 18 American soldiers on the streets of Mogadishu.

Less than a year later, we failed to prevent genocide - the premeditated and systematic murder of people - in Rwanda. "Never again" happened again.

America is becoming a nation of selfish, selective isolationists, willing to engage the rest of the world economically, but loath to intervene to protect human life. When our allies in the Persian Gulf were threatened, America was willing to go to war - slowly and carefully, as a democracy ought to. But our delay in responding to human-rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia resulted in untold numbers of deaths and added years to Bosnia's recovery and reconciliation process.

Certainly, as the father of a Marine infantry officer, I don't want our military personnel endangered needlessly. But this and subsequent generations of soldiers face great danger from America's inability to articulate its national interests. Problems like economic instability, environmental degradation and diseases such as AIDS, don't stop at national borders. Neither does contempt for human life.

We are willing to consider global strategies for economic and environmental problems. A global view also is needed to sustain an acceptable quality of life for the world's people - even at the cost, as a last resort, of military intervention to ensure a people's survival.

I believe the American people would be willing to follow courageous leadership to stand against human-rights abuses. But my generation has produced great politicians, not leaders. A leader is concerned with what's right; a politician with what's popular. Today's foreign policy is about political considerations, opinion polls and potential for photo ops. It is not, unfortunately, about "sustainment" of human life.

We need leadership in this post-Cold War transition time. We need to be so engaged in the world, so predictable in terms of our values, and so sure of ourselves - what we will live for and what we will die for - that no one will take us on.

Robert A. Seiple, president of World Vision, United States, has visited Vietnam 10 times over the past 10 years and is the author of "A Missing Peace." In 1967 and '68, Seiple was a Marine aviator and flew 300 missions out of DaNang.