Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [158]
Before proceeding to details, we should take careful note of the background assumptions that guide this inquiry. As we noted, for Braestrup and Freedom House, the “allies” are the United States, the South Vietnamese client government, and the various South Korean, Thai, Australian, Chinese Nationalist, and other forces (largely mercenary) mobilized by the United States. The “South Vietnamese” include our client government and the armed forces organized, supplied, trained, and directed by the United States, but exclude the indigenous NLF and its supporters, although the U.S. government never had the slightest doubt, and its specialists do not hesitate to concede, that the client regime had little support while its opponents in South Vietnam constituted so powerful a political force that any peaceful settlement was unthinkable. That the United States has a right to conduct military operations in South Vietnam to uproot the NLF and destroy the peasant society in which it was based, that its goals are democracy and self-determination, and that its forces “protect” and “bring security” to South Vietnamese peasants are principles taken for granted in the Braestrup–Freedom House version, where no patriotic assumption or cliché is ever challenged—or even noticed, so deeply rooted are these doctrines. Correspondingly, the fact that the media coverage surveyed is framed entirely within these patriotic premises passes unnoticed. The Freedom House inquiry cannot perceive fundamental bias favorable to the state because all of the premises of state doctrine are taken as given. There is “mindlessness” here, as Braestrup observes, although it is not quite what he perceives; rather, we find that Braestrup “mindlessly” adopts what we referred to in chapter 3 as a patriotic agenda, even more so than the media he condemns. And as we described in chapter 1, the function of such “flak machines” as Freedom House is to ensure that the press stays within the bounds of this patriotic agenda.
The Tet offensive of January 1968 began on January 21 with a siege by North Vietnamese (NVA) regulars of a U.S. military base at Khe Sanh, near the 17th parallel. It was soon apparent that the purpose was to draw U.S. forces away from populated centers, and the siege succeeded in this aim, as General Westmoreland rushed combat forces to the northern areas. On January 31, all major cities and thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, along with numerous other towns, came under simultaneous attack by southern NLF resistance forces (“Viet Cong”), along with some NVA elements. The effects are succinctly summarized by Wallace Thies in his scholarly study of the U.S. strategy of “coercing Hanoi”:
. . . although U.S. military commanders would later claim that the offensive had been anticipated and that the heavy casualties suffered by the attackers had resulted in a great victory for the Allies, the offensive was in fact a military setback for the American side. To meet the threat in the northern provinces and forestall a Dien Bien Phu-type defeat at Khe Sanh, half of all U.S. maneuver battalions in South Vietnam were deployed in I Corps [in the north]; the rest, along with the bulk of the combat-ready ARVN [GVN, Government of (South) Vietnam] units, were tied down defending the cities against the possibility of a second wave of attacks. As a result, the countryside went by default to the NLF, the pacification program was left in a shambles, and whatever losses the DRV / VC [North Vietnamese / Viet Cong] forces did suffer in the initial assaults were largely offset by the unimpeded recruiting that they conducted in the rural areas in the weeks that followed.110
International Voluntary Services (IVS), which had a close familiarity with the situation