Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The media that comforts the enemy and tries to lower US resolve

Martin Fackler:

Are there no limits to the comfort and support being given to our enemies by our so-called news media? On the front page of the Oct. 20 issue of USA Today, we find the headline "Put to test, 300 Iraqi troops fled." But in the fine print we find that 2,000 other Iraqi troops stuck with U.S. forces in taking the militant stronghold in Samarra. The one of eight who purportedly fled got the headline: The seven of eight who remained and fought were mentioned as an afterthought. American successes in Iraq are ignored or minimized — only shortcomings are highlighted.
The Vietnam conflict was lost by the treason of our news media as it falsely reported the Tet offensive of 1968 as a defeat. In 1968, I was a combat surgeon at the U.S. Naval Support Hospital in Danang. Since we were also a prisoner of war hospital, we treated the enemy's wounded as well as our own. After the Tet offensive, we noted that our prisoners, who had been mostly Viet Cong (Communist South Vietnamese forces), were mostly North Vietnamese troops. Why? Because in the Tet offensive we killed 60,000 of the estimated 80,000 Viet Cong combatants virtually overnight. North Vietnam had to send its troops to replace the Viet Cong. The Tet offensive was an unmitigated military disaster for North Vietnam. The Viet Cong finally came out to fight (ambushes and guerrilla tactics had been the norm previously) — and we destroyed them. A national uprising against the Americans, which Tet's simultaneous countrywide attacks were intended to incite, never happened.
Our press, however, falsely reported the Tet offensive as a defeat for the Americans, harping on that distortion incessantly until it had destroyed the will of the American public to continue the war. That misrepresentation in the press coverage of Vietnam is well documented in "The Big Story — How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington" by the longtime journalist and the director of communications at the Library of Congress, Peter Braestrup.

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Our desertion of Vietnam has certainly emboldened our enemy in the war on terror. One must wonder if September 11 would even have happened had we stayed and won in Vietnam. Our withdrawal graphically demonstrated the Achilles' heel of our democracy is its susceptibility to allowing its very freedoms to be used to destroy it. We say that our freedoms do not include the right to falsely cry "fire" in a crowded theater. But we allowed our "free press" to do its equivalent in its distortions about Vietnam. We are currently allowing it to do the same thing in its reporting about Iraq, which is frighteningly similar to that about Vietnam in its misleading content, distorted focus and malignant effect.

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Thus far, battles in the war on terror are not being fought in our homeland — yet our press is too busy dwelling on anything it can interpret as bad. The American presence continues to draw terrorists into Iraq, where we are very successfully annihilating them, just as we did the Viet Cong in the Tet offensive of 1968. But our terrorist enemies are counting on the cooperation of our media to act as it did in reporting events from Vietnam: And our media is complying. Its subtle propaganda of ending news broadcasts with the names of those killed in Iraq tears at the emotions of our populace.

Unlike Vietnam, there is now a vigorous alternative media that is challenging the perspective of the defeatist in the old media. As for the Tet offensive, Lyndon Johnson knew the communist had been defeated during the Tet attacks, but he also knew his strategy of forcing a stalemate in order to get the communist to negotiate a disengagement, had failed. When you successfully execute your strategy and still do not win you have a bad strategy. One of the ironies of the war in Vietnam is that after four years of continuing basically the Johnson strategy, Nixon finally went with the "hard knock" strategy that the Joint Chiefs had recommended to Johnson in 1964. The result was the "Christmas bombing" campaign in the north along with mining of Haiphong harbor. In a matter of weeks the communist agreed to a disengagement that Johnson would have jumped at years earlier which would have saved thousands of lives on both side. The Johnson-McNamara team thought the "hard knock" strategy was too dangerous. They could not have been more wrong.