Spot on as ever Mark. One more sad affair to reflect upon in what has been a depressing week for Conservatives everywhere: We have the Coulter affair up here in Canada, which shows the extent to which genuine political debate in this country has been asphyxiated by the progenies of Trudeaupian "values"; the US passes Obamacare and the Great One is sufficiently emboldened to dismiss the tens of millions of Americans who opposed it as mere "cynics" or agents of "special interests"; and in the UK, it seems that Gordon Brown could secure re-election despite doing to the UK economy what the pope has never done to a woman (well not one of legal age anyway).

Strictly speaking, MS is correct. In pure military terms Tet was an unmitigated disaster for the VC/NVA and by failing to convey to the American public the scale of the communists' defeat, Kronkite was not accurately reporting the situation on the ground. Yet perhaps some context is required. Most military historians agree that General William Westmoreland's strategy between 1965 and 1968 was inept. Westmoreland was fixated by the impressive (but somewhat inflated) communist body counts and was oblivious to the fact that his forces had little or no control over most of the territory of South Vietnam, despite the fact that he had 500,000 US troops at his disposal and had hitherto squandered the lives of 20,000 GI's. The sheer scale of the Tet Offensive finally exposed the fallacy propogated by Westmoreland and LBJ that America was close to victory in Vietnam. Kronkite did no more than point out that LBJ's policy in Vietnam to that date had been a dismal failure and conclude that victory could not be acheived at a price likely to be acceptable to US public opinion.