President now ‘accepting the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam?

Tigerhawk cuts through the media and lefty blogger spin on recent comments the President made about violence in Iraq in comparison to the Tet offensive in Vietnam.

PM Update: It’s absolutely appalling to see how much dishonesty the media is displaying in their reporting of this story. Tammy Bruce nails their dishonesty here (hat tip: Bak):

The left love those days because they caused this nation to fail. It was their Golden Years. Jane Fonda cavorting with the enemy. Walter Cronkite telling us the war was lost, night after night. John Kerry returning to gleefully slander our troops. The perpetuation of the Vietnam lie is also what today’s enemy counts on. The Islamist enemy knows it can only win the war with the help of American media. and media worldwide. Fascists know where they can get support, and while it will never be by choice of the majority of any people on Earth, it will always be with the worldwide left, and their only true weapon–control of worldwide media.

Yep, and something I’d like to add to that is that if you’ve done any studying on how the media covered the Vietnam war on the whole, you’ll understand why the media today feel so emboldended about reporting negatively on the war in Iraq. They figure they were able to aid in the US losing one “wrong war” and they feel they can do it again with the Iraq war. The media has an obsession with Vietnam. It was the first war they covered during and after the whole peace/love/harmony movement we had going on here in the US at the time of the ‘nam war and accordingly, they reported on the war from a decidedly anti-war angle, which stirred up already high anti-war sentiment that spilled out onto the streets, and influenced not only our politicians in Washington, but – more importantly and for the worse – boosted the morale of the enemy. As we now know, the media’s role in the shaping of opinions on Vietnam had disastrous consequences for our troops abroad, as well as America’s reputation world wide.

Democrats and the media love to accuse the President and his war cabinet of ‘not learning the lessons of Vietnam’ but I think a mirror would be quite handy to hand to these people next time they make such an accusation because it’s Democrats and the media more than any other group of people who have failed to learn the lessons of their anti-war rhetoric and biased reporting back during the time American troops were fighting in Vietnam.

I’ve posted the following quote before, and will do so again – it comes from PAVN Colonel Bui Tin from an interview he did with the Wall Street Journal, which was published on August 3rd, 1995:

Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?

A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.

Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits?

A: Keenly.

Q: Why?

A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.

Who helped ensure that sure those anti-war sentiments increased higher and higher, which put more and more pressure on our politicians to advocate withdrawal from Vietnam? Who made sure the news was saturated day in and day out with anti-war sentiment so much to the point that you knew about the violent anti-war protests here, Hanoi Jane’s picture with North Vietnamese troops day, and John Kerry’s testimony about alleged attrocities our troops were enaging in? Who embellished what was going on in Vietnam to make it sound worse than it actually was? Answer to all of the above: the mainstream media with the help of anti-war Democrats like Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, John Kerry – just to name a few.

And they’re trying to do it again today with Iraq. The Iraq/Vietnam comparison has been thrown out there even before the Iraq war even started. I can remember that about three days into the war, when we were first starting to hear stories about troops being killed or captured, the usual suspects started wondering if this was going to be the ‘next Vietnam.’ The same thing happened in the opening month of the war in Afghanistan. All wars, to the media and Democrats, are viewed through the prism of Vietnam. The first sign of bloodshed that an American soldier suffers means the war is ‘turning into Vietnam.’ Once that feeling really takes root, there’s no turning back and everything negative that happens in a war is spun into ‘being just like Vietnam.’ It’s the defeatist mentality at its worst.

The Dems and the media are not stupid when it comes to understanding how to go about shaping the opinions of the American people: they know America remembers the Vietnam war, the tens of thousands of American soldiers we lost as a result of that war, the daily drumbeat of negative headlines and images from that time, and they know the impact it all had on war support here at home. They are fully aware of the power they have to influence the American people one way or the other and they couldn’t be more happy right now that the President has supposedly joined them in their routine paralleling this war with Vietnam, because the President supposedly ‘agreeing’ with them means he might come around to ‘acknowledging’ that Iraq war is lost, and that we should withdraw. It would be a defeat for a US president and America all over again, and would once again ‘prove’ to the world that America has ‘no business asserting its power’ in other countries – unless it’s a country the UN favors intervention in, of course.

They were ‘successful’ regarding Vietnam. Let’s hope that their blatant dishonesty and one-sided coverage of the war in Iraq doesn’t mean they’ll be ‘successful’ with the Iraq war, too.

(Original post posted at 9:57 a.m.)

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