If Gaza is the new Vietnam then this is just the start

by Arvind Dilawar

Similarities exist between 2024 and 1968, but our current moment is more akin to Vietnam pre-1965 — before the US really got involved.

A surprise attack on a U.S. ally shifting the course of a long-running conflict, a Democratic president’s re-election campaign subsequently aborted, his party holding a contentious convention in the aftermath, and the conflict rapidly escalating into a regional proxy war — is this the year 2024 or 1968?

It’s a question that commentators from The New York Times to The Nation have implicitly posed in editorials comparing aspects of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza to that of the Vietnam War. And there is something to it. In January 1968, the Chinese-backed Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, a surprise attack on the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese and U.S. troops, which would be a turning point in the war. It would also have profound implications in the United States, including the abortion of Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign in March and the Democrats’ riotous national convention in Chicago in August. Overseas, the U.S. government would respond to the Tet Offensive by further expanding its military operations in neighboring Laos in July and Cambodia in March of the following year. Substitute Iran, Hamas, Israel, Biden, Lebanon and Yemen, and you’d have a rough summary of 2024, give or take a few months here and there.

While there are strong similarities to 1968, our current moment is actually more akin to Vietnam pre-1965, before the United States began its ground war and consequently expanded the draft. Accordingly, the challenge for opponents then and now remains the same: organizing against a conflict that is not yet directly touching the lives of most people in the United States — before we're all dragged further into a genocidal war.