Where the right is on the war. From TPM Reader JDG …
Yes, our war in Iraq is very much like the one in Viet Nam, but not the way its opponents mean the comparison. What’s similar is this: Both of these war efforts by the United States have been sabotaged, probably on purpose, and we will probably lose this one as we lost Viet Nam, by the media’s practice of showing us the daily body count in color on the nightly news every single day, again and again and again and again!
It is simply impossible for a democratic country to pursue any war, no matter how justified, to a successful conclusion under those conditions.
No matter what you think of the merits of the present war, it’s obvious that two choices lie before America: either we go back to our pre-1950 policy (which most countries in the world still follow) of wartime censorship — not just of information that would help enemy commanders, but also of information that would undermine our own public’s morale — or we may as well pack it in and invite China to rule our country, since we can never possibly win another war.
Telling on many levels. Perhaps the most revealing is the assumption that we’d be better off, in a better position to bring the endeavor to a successful conclusion if we were still under the illusion that Doug Feith, Paul Bremer and Don Rumsfeld were doing a bang up job — and in all likelihood that they were still running the show.
