Our hostile press.

Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

. . . There's also a peril for the political left [in the "visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment "]. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences.^[1]

We're not much of a partisan of the idea that Vietnam reporting was honest. Maybe it was.^[2] The problem was probably that the military and the Nixon and Johnson permitted the press to operate in Vietnam without the ground rules that applied to reporters in WWII. There was plenty of killing to report and any "honest," i.e., Vietnam-like, reporting about Tarawa would have curdled the blood of the folks at home just as much.

It was the justness of the war that the press could not or would not see. Vietnam was a noble effort to halt the spread of communism. LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin Incident was probably bogus but the war had noble objectives and bought time for the rest of SE Asia to keep from being dominoes. The communists got a lesson in fearing the wrath of America.

The parallels between the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the (quite false) furor over Saddam's WMDs is instructive. Wars can be worthwhile endeavors, notwithstanding that the rationale therefore at the outset is later subject to contentious and partisan reexamination. Wherever you are disposed to come out on the WMD issue, it's instructive to recall that Wilson and FDR were less than candid, might it be said, about the prospect of U.S. involvement in then extant European food fights.

Now, you'd swear George Bush was the first president in history ever to have made statements that later proved to be inaccurate or made an judgment call based on other than sworn affidavits.

The left today act and during the time of Vietnam acted as though wars can be fought with the precision of laser eye surgery. No war is anything less than a barbaric blood bath in which civilized and uncivilized men do uncivilized things to each other and lots of innocent people nearby. Given the perfection of artillery and aerial bombardment, the well known propensity of our present foes to fight from among the civilian population, the bad manners of our enemies not to wear identifying uniforms, the extreme difficulty of urban warfare, and human imperfection, any modern war is going to be a clumsy slaughter.

If anything, collateral deaths as a result of U.S. action are probably far, far less than what they might be due to precision weapons and, of course, extreme troop caution about the death of innocents.

Not that Mr. Murtha knows this. Let any sparrow fall in Basra or Fallujah and it's time to smear the military as being bird murderers.

Back to 1975: assuming the press as a whole distinguished itself during the Vietnam war, it revealed its liberal bias by failing to report on the ghastly experience of the South Vietnamese and Cambodians after the U.S. left.^[3] In those areas -- as in every other facet of the monstrous history of communism in the 20th century – the press failed utterly to report the extent and the brutality of the killing, torture, and oppression that was the very essence of every nation under communism.

To the contrary, the press was a willing mouthpiece for the dippy anti-anti-communist peace-at-any-price crowd that did its best to frustrate an strong defense against the Soviet, Chinese, and Western Hemisphere thugs, killers, and madmen.

For that, the press is entitled to no respect at all.

Even at this late date, with the starkest of evidence available of the barbarity and aggresiveness of the jihadis, the press persists in its aim to delegitimize what is a brave and generous effort by our troops and George Bush to carry the war to the doorstep of the enemy.

Lack of absolute perfection in the execution of our national goals aside, that effort is chewing up the foreign scum who have flooded into Iraq at a prodigious rate.

Apparently, to the left, that's some kind of a problem.

Notes
^[1] Vietnam, Watergate and Rove." By Michael Barone, Wall Street Journal, 6/16/06.
^[2] Frank Snepp in his Decent Interval, Random House (1977), made a convincing case that the U.S. had indeed won the war on the ground only to have the U.S. Congress snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Such was hardly the case made by the press at the time, which, after 1975, seemed positively to relish the U.S. military "defeat." Hence our hesitation to concede the fairness of the press during the war itself.
^[3] A notable exception was Elizabeth Becker, a reporter for the Washington Post. She wrote an excellent account of the Khmer Rouge madness in When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. Public Affairs, 1986..