Roundup: Media's Take

April 23, 2004

The Last Time the U.S. Faced Losses Like this Was in Nam

Drew Brown, in the Montreal Gazette (April 18, 2004):With fighting in Iraq now at its worst, the number of U.S. troops killed by enemy fire has reached the highest level since the Vietnam War. The first half of April has been the bloodiest period so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. There were 87 deaths by hostile fire in the first 15 days of this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the "shock and awe" invasion, when 82 Americans were

April 22, 2004

History Seems to Offer No Lessons for America

Tony Walker, in the Australian Financial Review (fApril 17, 2004):History seems to offer no lessons for America as it repeats a number of the serious errors it made in Vietnam one of the most notable being the lack of an exit strategy. On August 5, 1964, US president Lyndon Baines Johnson sent a message to Congress asking for war powers to confront a communist menace in Asia. "America keeps her word. Here, as elsewhere, we must and shall hono

April 22, 2004

Bush Has Forgotten the Hard Lesson Jefferson Learned from the French Revolution: Democracy Can't Be Rushed

Thom Hartmann, author of We The People: A Call To Take Back America, in CommonDreams.org (April 21, 2004):Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought they could bomb Vietnam into accepting democracy. George W. Bush

April 20, 2004

James Lilley: Taiwan and China ... A U.S. Headache

James Lilley, former ambassador to China, in the WSJ (April 19, 2004): ... Our experience tells us that Americans usually are not smart enough to master the intricacies of Chinese history. Our principles for shaping a framework have thus evolved from circumstances at the time: We supported One China because both Chinese sides wanted it in the 1970s when we first opened to China. Then, when

April 20, 2004

Mike Davis: Urban Warfare Is the American Military's Worst Nightmare

Mike Davis, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 19, 2004): The young American Marine is exultant."It's a sniper's dream,' he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah."You can go anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are." "Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to des

April 16, 2004

Japanese Feel that Iraq Is Like Lebanon

J. Sean Curtin, a GLOCOM fellow at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications, in Japan Focus (April 2004):The dramatic abduction of three Japanese civilians in Iraq -- hostage bargaining chips -- is reverberating throughout Japan, casting a long shadow over the future of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his Iraq policy of dispatching troops on a humanitarian mission to help the United States there. It evo

April 16, 2004

Why Iraq Feels Like Lebanon

James Bennet, in the NYT (April 10, 2004): Americans struggling to make sense, or maybe political hay, out of the violence convulsing Iraq turn almost reflexively to the searing experience of the Vietnam War. Israel is haunted by another parallel: its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which for Israelis of a certain generation was their Vietnam. It, too, was envisione

April 16, 2004

Paul Krugman: The Lies About Iraq Bring Back Memories of Vietnam

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (April 16, 2004): Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse. It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the

April 16, 2004

Stephen Schwartz: This Isn't Vietnam and It Isn't Tet

Stephen Schwartz, an author and journalist, and the author of The Two Faces of Islam, in frontpagemag.com , in (April 14, 2004):...Some wishful-thinking enemies of Iraqi liberation even sought to compare the disorders with the Tet offensive of 1968, when a massive North Vietnamese attack on South Vietnamese and American forces contributed significantly to domestic U.S. disaf

April 16, 2004

Louis Freeh's Leadership of the FBI Was a Disaster for American National Security

Shawn Macomber, a staff writer at the American Spectator, in frontpagemag.com (April 16, 2004): Louis Freeh was and remains an intelligent, talented man and a true patriot. But that cannot stop us from judging his performance at the helm of the FBI – and the verdict is dismal. The problem was Freeh identified too well

April 16, 2004

Charles Krauthammer: Not Vietnam, Not Tet

Charles Krauthammer, in frontpagemag.com (April 16, 2004):The first George Bush once said he thought the Gulf War would cure America of the Vietnam syndrome. He was wrong. There is no cure for the Vietnam syndrome. It will only go away when the baby-boom generation does, dying off like the Israelites in the desert, allowing a new generation, cleansed of the memories and the guilt, to look at the world

April 16, 2004

A Southerner's Perspective on the Iraq Occupation

Charles Goodson, Chairman Southern Parties of the Southwest, in PHXNews.com (April 15, 2004):For some time I have pondered why are so many Iraqis are fighting against the U.S. led coalition, why are we still taking casualties? Then the answer hit me like a ton of bricks, there has been no surrender of the Iraqi Army, or Government under Saddam Hussein. Just because there is an Iraqi Governing Cou

April 15, 2004

John Kerry: Some Raise Questions About His First Purple Heart

Michael Kranish, in the Boston Globe (April 14, 2004):John F. Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam, distinguished by Silver and Bronze stars and the close-range killing of an enemy fighter, is highlighted in his campaign ads and cheered on the trail. Even the campaign of President Bush, who did not see combat, hasn't tried to make an issue of his opponent's service record. But as the presidential campaign heats up, some Vietnam veterans are using the

April 15, 2004

Nadine Gordimer: Remembering History, 10 Years After the End of Apartheid

Nadine Gordimer, in the Independent (April 14, 2004):To think we can look back at freedom as part of our history: a decade of attainment to follow on the long struggle against colonialism and its culmination in apartheid. But what is history? The dictionary says: "A narrative of events; a story; a chronicle. A chronological record of events, as of a life, devel

April 15, 2004

Christopher Hitchens: Not Vietnam, Not Lebanon

Christopher Hitchens, in Slate (April 12, 2004):Of what does this confrontation [between the coalition and Iraqi insurgents] remind you? Why, of Vietnam, says Sen. Edward Kennedy. No, more like Lebanon in 1982, says the New York Times. The usually admirable Colbert King, in the Washington Post, asking how we got ourselves into this, compares pro-American Iraqis to the Uncle Toms on whom liberal opinion used to

April 15, 2004

The Case from WW II that Will Determine the Future of the Guantanamo Prisoners

Charles Lane, a staff writer at the Washington Post, in Slate (April 14, 2004):In the spring of 1941, a 46-year-old German intelligence officer named Lothar Eisentrager slipped across the Soviet-Chinese border and made his way to the Pacific port of Shanghai. There he assumed the name of Ludwig Ehrhardt and took charge of German espionage operations for the entire Far East—a mission that would ulti

April 15, 2004

Churck Colson: It's Islam vs. the West

Chuck Colson, in Townhall.com (April 15, 2004):I’ve known President Bush since he was governor of Texas and gave us permission to start the first Christian prison in this country. One thing I’ve always liked about him is that he says what he means and means what he says.That’s why I felt something was missing in his speech and press conference Tuesday night. I th

April 14, 2004

Iraq Is a Mess Because Bush Ignored History

Enda O'Doherty, in the Irish Times (April 12, 2004):For former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, writing in the London Independent, President Bush's rhetoric in response to the latest violence was based above all on denial. It is difficult to believe, he concluded, that the coalition forces will find a solution until they first admit they have a problem. Manuel Carvalho, writing in Publico of Lisbon, thought the coalition's problems were primarily du

April 14, 2004

Military Tribunals Have a Controversial History

Keith Suter, in the Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia) (April 12, 2004):One of US President George W. Bush's most controversial decisions in the war on terrorism is the creation of military tribunals to try suspects, including two Australians. Part of the President's problem is that American military tribunals have a long and controversial history. Military tribunals use military officers as the prosecution, defence, judge and jury, and there is no role

April 13, 2004

Iraq and Lebanon: Who Says History Doesn't Repeat Itself?

Claude Salhani, UPI International Editor (April 12, 2004): Since the eruption of the recent bloody clashes in Iraq, pitting U.S. and coalition troops against Shiites and Sunnis, the situation in the war-torn country has been alternatively compared to the Vietnam war and to the Palestinian intifada. But one missing comparison has been to that of a much closer analogy -- that of Syrian and Israeli inv