Journalists Stuck in Their Own Quagmire

Michael Barone writes at The London Telegraph yesterday:

Too many Americans and, so far as I can judge, Britons insist on seeing what is going on in Iraq through the prism of Vietnam. Eight days after military action began in Iraq last March, a front-page story in the New York Times used the dreaded word "quagmire". And when fighters began shooting at Americans in Fallujah and Moqtada al-Sadr led his "Mahdi army" into Najaf, American reporters and editorialists almost instantly compared the situation to the Tet offensive of January and February 1968. The abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison are routinely compared to My Lai.

Never mind that these comparisons to Vietnam are wildly disproportionate. The Abu Ghraib incidents did not constitute a massacre; My Lai did. Americans were fighting in large numbers in Vietnam from early 1965 until Tet, before analysts started opining that America was in a quagmire. Eight days versus 35 months: some quagmire. And the several thousand not very well organised fighters versus the more than 100,000 Viet Cong: some Tet. Plus, as we know now, the media's analysis of Tet was wrong: Tet was a huge defeat for the Viet Cong and largely cleared South Vietnam, for a time, of Communist fighters.

But never mind. For liberal Americans of a certain age, the American involvement in Vietnam is the paradigmatic event in human history. It demonstrated — or their warped view of it demonstrated — that America could be on the wrong side of a war, that American military action was dangerous (as the peacenik slogan had it) to children and other living things and could accomplish nothing positive. And to American journalists of that age and younger generations, Vietnam and the soon-to-follow disaster for the American presidency, Watergate, were proof that disbelieving American leaders and providing the most jaundiced coverage of their actions was the road to enormous success and wealth....

See also Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode: Why? and More Historical Perspective.

(Thanks, Big Trunk.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 07:35:07 AM
Categorized as Media.