An insurgency in the position of using its major weapons to punish noncombatants is not in a winning situation

You will look long and hard to find any of this in the legacy media. Apart from a handful of exceptions (such as John F. Burns of the New York Times), it's simply not being covered. Those operational names would come across as bizarre to the average reader, the gains they have made impossible to fit into the worldview that has been peddled unceasingly by the dead tree fraternity.

J R Dunn goes on to wonder what it is exactly that the American left wants.

What the media are concentrating on — and will continue to concentrate on, in defiance of sense, protest and logic, to the bitter end — are peripheral stories such as the Democrats' Senate pajama party, reassertions of the claim that the war has "helped" al-Qaida and the latest proclamation from the world's greatest fence-sitters.

…Vietnam also had its ruling narrative, one that had no room for successful combat operations. That narrative had been born in 1968, at the time of the Tet offensive. …It was an utter rout, with the communists losing something in the order of 60,000 men. The Viet Cong were crippled as a military force and never did recover.

But panicky reporters, many of whom had never set foot on a battlefield (not to mention figures at ease with manipulating the facts, such as Peter Arnett), were badly shaken by the opening moves of the offensive, among them an abortive attack on the U.S. embassy grounds at Saigon. Their reportage, broadcast and printed nationwide, portrayed a miserable defeat for the U.S. and its allies, with the Viet Cong and PAVN striking where they pleased and making off at their leisure.

The media portrait of a beleaguered American war effort was never corrected, and became the consensus view. … After Tet, there could be no victories. The success of the Abrams strategy was buried for 20 years and more, as the myth of utter U.S. defeat was put in concrete by "experts" such as Stanley Karnow, Frances FitzGerald and Neil Sheehan. Only with the appearance of revisionist works such as Lewis Sorley's "A Better War" and Mark Moyar's "Triumph Forsaken" has the record begun to be set straight.

That was how it was played at the close of the Vietnam War. That's how it's being played today. And what do they want, exactly? What is the purpose of playing so fast and loose with the public safety, national security and human lives both American and foreign?

Generally, when someone repeats a formula, it's because they want to repeat a result. And that's what the American left wants in this case. … The American left wants a return to the 1970s — without Jimmy Carter. They want a cowed GOP. They want control of the institutions and the branches. They want a miserable, defeated country they can manipulate.