The death of Vietnam War-era Robert McNamara unsurprisingly led liberal journalists to once again see the Iraq War as a Vietnam sequel. In a Sunday Outlook section piece in The Washington Post, former Post Pentagon reporter Bradley Graham promoted his new Donald Rumsfeld biography by asking when Rumsfeld will apologize like McNamara for the war that "many Americans see as a damnable misadventure, too costly in lives, money and national image."
Evidently, it doesn’t matter how Iraq’s democracy looks now, compared to Vietnam’s concentration camps and dictatorship.
Rumsfeld remains filled with a bitter sense that perceptions of the war and of his role in it have been badly distorted by one-sided media coverage, much of it based on self-serving accounts by State Department and National Security Council officials.
"The intellectual dishonesty on the part of the press is serious," ... "a strong incentive to be negative and dramatic" infused much of the coverage. It's a formula that works. It gets Pulitzers; it gets promotions; it gets name identification on the front page above the fold."
As an example, he noted accusations that Bush and Cheney lied about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in making the case for the invasion.
"They never say Colin Powell lied,"
Here is the furthest Graham will go to acknowledge that maybe Iraq is "salvageable," which is weak way of saying the war can be won:
Conditions in Iraq appear considerably more salvageable now than 2 1/2 years ago when Rumsfeld was replaced. If Iraq ultimately emerges as a stable country, the mistakes of the early years can be portrayed simply as the kinds of errors experienced in any conflict.
That would be an achievement, considering that the "one-sided media" seemed quite invested in a Vietnam-style debacle and a reinstatement of the Vietnam syndrome that would curb all American military "misadventures."
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