Silent Nights

President Pinhead said Wednesday he would "not be rushed" into a decision on a strategy change for Iraq. After all, with the holidays - the Christian holidays - fast approaching, he certainly wouldn't want to start up any of that radical deciding for which he has become so famous. That might eat into his time on the Ranch back in Crawford.
Still, I couldn't help but reflect on a pair of historical holiday items, connected with this time of war and strife. The first is the brief unofficial cessation of hostilities that occurred between German and British troops stationed on the Western Front of World War I during Christmas 1914. I've always enjoyed this story, primarily from the standpoint that the decision was not made by politicians or commanders, but by the guys in the trenches. They decided to take a day off killing one another, and bury their dead. They mourned their dead together in No Man's Land, and in some versions of the story, went on to play soccer against one another in the open field between the barbed wire. Without a common religion, this kind of spontaneous eruption of peace seems unlikely to occur in Baghdad later this month.
It is more likely that we could experience something more along the lines of The Tet Offensive. The North Vietnamese leadership decided that the time was ripe for a major conventional offensive. They believed that the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. presence were so unpopular in the South that a broad-based attack would spark a spontaneous uprising of the South Vietnamese population, which would enable the North to sweep to a quick, decisive victory. They chose the beginning of the Lunar New Year at the end of January, 1968 to launch this attack. North Vietnam had announced in October that it would observe a seven-day truce from January 27 to February 3, 1968, in honor of the Tet holiday, and the South Vietnamese army made plans to allow recreational leave for a large part of its force. Historically viewed as a strategic failure, the Tet Offensive is generally considered the straw that broke America's back in Vietnam. It was in March, 1968 that Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek another term in the White House. LBJ didn't want to be rushed, either.
Decades later, we approach another holiday season. Maybe we can hope that it will be the soldiers on the ground making the decisions this year, and not the "deciders".