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British imperialism and the Tet offensive
KEITH FLETT looks back 50 years to one of the turning points of the Vietnam war

IT might be thought that the Tet offensive, a key moment of the Vietnam war that started at the end of January 1968, 50 years ago, is something that the Western media might prefer not to dwell on too much.

The line in 1967 from Democratic US president Lyndon Johnson had been that the war was reaching its final stages, that Vietnam would stay as two countries: a communist state in the north and a US client state designed to maintain US imperial interests in Indochina in the south.

General Giap, the military leader of the Vietnam People’s Army, had other ideas.

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