The Iraqi "tet" will happen like this...

[Javaman]

it won't be a nationwide attack. They don't need to do that.

Because of these media dog and pony shows, one "incident" will take care of it for all the world to see.

That incident would be one of the many pro war fools plodding down this same tired hollywood backdrop of a street, when out of the blue, they get shot, blow to bits or some other thing happens.

That would be in effect the nail in the coffin.

This would be the most effective use of propaganda by the insurgents.

It would paint a very clear picture to the US and the world that there is no longer any safe place left in Iraq.

[babylonsister]

1. A well-placed bomb (if there is such a thing) exploding in the

Green Zone, killing and/or maiming hundreds, ought to do it.
:-(

[Selatius]

2. 16 ex-Republican Guard fighters breach the outer wall of the Green Zone with an EFP

They're in it for the suicide mission. Once the projectile EFP punches through, they charge through the hole and start shooting everything moving. They come in heavily armed operating in groups of two. They split up into eight groups and move separately into the Zone shooting at everything in sight. To be sure, they will all be killed in the end, but the chaos it would inflict inside the Zone would be heard around the world.

[riderinthestorm]

3. Small, very small suitcase nuke in Iraq instantly attributed to Iran. nt

[GeorgeGist]

4. Tony already told you ...

it's coming to a mall near you.

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. There will be no Tet in Iraq

One of the problems that we faced in Vietnam - indeed, that the Western mind always seems to face, is its "reliance" on history. Put another way, we're always fighting the last war rather than attending to the singularity of the current war, at least for the first few years. This is a bit like the French building the Maginot Line, a remarkably effective obstacle for static trench warfare, but utterly useless against highly mobile units. In Vietnam, we tended to conceive of the war in terms of "ground" or "territory," pretending that it was Korea, or even Europe, hence the absurdities of the mythical "DMZ, and atrocities like the various A Shau Valley campaigns of 1969 ("Hamburger Hill" being the most flagrant stupidity of the territory mistake). And so again, in Iraq, even critics like to think the war in terms of Vietnam. It's not Vietnam. It just isn't. The OP recognizes this by asking us to transform Tet for the singularoty of the Iraqi occasion. This still falls short.

The Tet Offensive was not merely a strategic move. It was the manifestation of a distinct political philosophy. The Vietnamese Communists were doctrinaire dialectical materialists. That is to say, they believed in the progression of the dialectic in material events and processes. Hence, you get General Giap's famous concept of People's War, a dialectical materialist formulation of first order, proceeding in stages through struggle and contradiction. Tet was formulated when "conditions were historically ripe," in the classic materialist dialectic. It cannot be understood outside this conceptual framework.

The Islamic political philosophy operates much differently. There is no progression through stages, with each stage building on and incorporating the last, but rather steady repetition - even pure repetition, cyclical and monotonous, like the daily prayer. In this sense, Westerners better understand even the Vietnamese communist thought than the Iraqi insurgent thought, since Western thought itself is steeped in the notion of "historical progression." (As a side note, Vietnamese thought itself had to bend to the essentially Western dialectical materialism, and often never did; peasants especially in the south retained the Buddhist worldview of repetition, which was more troubling for US strategy than the more understandable People's War.) So, what's the upshot? An event like a Tet, an event that's conceived and executed as a stage in a historical progression, could not happen in Iraq. Our fate there is far worse:no progression (this is why reports of "steady progress" are now so laughable), no "big event" to latch on to, nothing. Just repetition. And it may be that repetition is the only "Tet" that the Iraqi insurgents need, since it is far more intolerable to the American temperament than is the steady movement toward a big event.

We have to start thinking differently. You ask what will "Tet" look like in Iraq. My response is simple: the kind of Tet that we're going to see in Iraq has been going on for four plus years, Tet in slow motion, tantric Tet, with not even the excited satisfaction of the money shot.

[Javaman]

6. I posted a long time ago about the concept of a slow motion tet...

but I have come to believe that all that does is numb the american public to increasing levels of violence.

Once, it's made clear to the now anti-war american population that the curtain has been pulled back, that one of the staged ops got completely screwed, the and only then the war will be declared over and we will pull out.

right now all we are getting is the political opportunists that are running for office using the term "pull out" because it's the new buzz phrase du jour.

Once a high profile photo opped baghdad street market visit is "violated" then all bets are off and you will see the defections from the pro war side coming over in droves.

what the Vietnamese Tet did was put a fine point on the propaganda that was being fed to us. Militarily speaking from a Viet Cong point of view, Tet was a complete failure, but from a physiological point of view, it was a complete and resounding success.

The type of tet I speak of for Iraq would achieve that hollywood style form of TV propaganda that can't be denighed. It's hard to spin something as a success when someone notable gets blow to bits.

[dkofos]

7. I volunteer Lyndsey Graham!!