Sadly holds up the fiction of US military superiority.
I understand that you want to say that the massive reinforcements of US troops and wide areas shortly controlled by the Viet Cong couldn't be held, combined with the losses in people and organizational capacity (by increased air bombardments and long supply lines) meant that the Tet couldn't stop the assault in short time - as (freely quoted from Viet Cong leadership) 'no offensive operations seem possible till replenishing of the troops' (which was supposed to take up to four years).
However it wasn't that the Viet Cong would've been defeated after the operation.
Furthermore I agree with you that the media impact in the US was important for the medial "homefront", though lets not act as if the anti-war movement was really as important as sometimes claimed. Nixon did shift from infantry and such to air bombings and forced intensification of South Vietnamese drafting so that more "South Vietnamese"-forces would be killed in operations. This is a very different logic in my opinion from "the media made it impossible to stay in Vietnam" - it was quite possible (would've been a bad move, but was possible non the less).
Nah, it's not what I want to say. What I want to say is that the VC ceased to be a factor in the war after they were all but destroyed in the Tet Offensive. Thereafter it was the NVA that did the fighting. Moreover the NVA may well have encouraged the VC to stand and fight and thus be eliminated.
The media did mislead the American people just like they did decades later in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
This is not quite accurate and:
Sadly holds up the fiction of US military superiority.
I understand that you want to say that the massive reinforcements of US troops and wide areas shortly controlled by the Viet Cong couldn't be held, combined with the losses in people and organizational capacity (by increased air bombardments and long supply lines) meant that the Tet couldn't stop the assault in short time - as (freely quoted from Viet Cong leadership) 'no offensive operations seem possible till replenishing of the troops' (which was supposed to take up to four years).
However it wasn't that the Viet Cong would've been defeated after the operation.
Furthermore I agree with you that the media impact in the US was important for the medial "homefront", though lets not act as if the anti-war movement was really as important as sometimes claimed. Nixon did shift from infantry and such to air bombings and forced intensification of South Vietnamese drafting so that more "South Vietnamese"-forces would be killed in operations. This is a very different logic in my opinion from "the media made it impossible to stay in Vietnam" - it was quite possible (would've been a bad move, but was possible non the less).
Nah, it's not what I want to say. What I want to say is that the VC ceased to be a factor in the war after they were all but destroyed in the Tet Offensive. Thereafter it was the NVA that did the fighting. Moreover the NVA may well have encouraged the VC to stand and fight and thus be eliminated.
The media did mislead the American people just like they did decades later in the run-up to the war in Iraq.