Deja Vu

The Vietnam War was the first war we watched up close and personal every night on television.

 
We were winning the war, until Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America", declared that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

Exhibit #1: February 27, 1968 ....

"Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities?

I'm not sure ...

"Mired in a Stalemate"

 This is Walter Cronkite. Good night."

American public opinion changed.

The North Vietnamese realized that they didn't have to win militarily, they only had to outlast the will of the American people, who were already sick of seeing husbands and sons, fathers and brothers coming home in body bags.

So, we declared a truce, pulled out our troops, and cut off funding to the South Vietnamese; the North Vietnamese restrengthened, the South Vietnamese government fell, and thousands of South Vietnamese were sent to 're-education camps' or killed outright.

Since then, even our former enemies have admitted that they did not win on the battlefield, but in the American Congress and in the American defeatist media.

Exhibit #2:

"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media were definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields.
We were ready to surrender.
You had won!" --
General Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam, TET primary strategist, from his memoirs).

Exhibit #2a:

"We know we can't beat you on the battlefield, but we can beat you on the streets of New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco." -- the North Vietnamese Son Tay POW camp commander to Commander Paul Galanti, U.S. Navy, American POW.

The generation of the 1960s that now inhabits the White House and the halls of Congress has apparently learned nothing from the disaster of Vietnam.

American media, most of it blatantly one-sided, oversees the message of doom and gloom and failure every night on television, and on many more channels than in the 1960's.

Public opinion polls are once again driving politics.
Politicians have threatened to cut off funding - not to the government of Iraq - but to our own troops!
And, yes, one political fool has declared that this war is lost.

Exhibit #3:

Senator Harry Reid: "This war is lost." April 19,2007

We can still lose this war, but it will be lost politically.
American troops in Iraq have had their hands tied with "rules of engagement" based on political, rather than military, considerations.

The Islamic insurgents are hoping for the same thing as the North Vietnamese Communists did- to outlast American public opinion until American troops are pulled out without successfully completing their mission.

Deja Vu

(Political cartoonist: Gary Brookins, Richmond Times-Dispatch)