Being a progressive American civilian working aboard US Naval vessels in the North Arabian Gulf, I too must question where the money from Iraq's oil is going. I've spent the past two months just off the coast of Iraq, protecting the two Iraqi oil platforms that provide up to 85% of all Iraqi oil revenues. Super tankers are in and out of the platforms constantly, taking with them a approximate forty-million dollars worth of oil. Over two months, that's a lot of cash. I'm supposing all of that money is going straight to Halliburton.Tom Friedman was up here last month and did a few articles about the area, but I've yet to get a read on them.

Actually, I believe support for the Vietnam War dropped below 50% after Tet in early 1968. I think the American deaths were 20,000 at the time. Support for our Iraq policy is below 50% now as our deaths stand at 2100. So i think opposition now is way ahead of where it was then. this is not surprising, given that millions of people worldwide protested on 2/15/2003 even before Bush invaded.

Yet please don't forget journalists such as Paul Krugman, Seymour Hersh (then and now), Robert Scheer (also then & now - his reward, being canned by the LA Times but fortunately he's in the SF Examiner), the Knight Ridder coverage, Frank Rich, Nation magazine, and a few other brave souls who told the truth when it was difficult in the post 9/11 hysteria that Bush exploited. Also, now we can get the worldwide press online, a luxury we didn't have during Vietnam. We can't forget the bloggers who we also didn't have during Vietnam.

PS -- If you're up for being nauseated, check out the Guardian's piece today about Rupert Murdoch.  His thoughts about his significant, wonderful contributions to the British press (including the overnight sacking of the entire union of printers) are particularly choice.

See story here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1650588,00.html

Support for our Iraq policy is below 50% now as our deaths stand at 2100.

We must do what we can to assure that the death count doesn't begin to approach anywhere near that of the Vietnam War.  I'm thinking that Bush will draw down the numbers of troops by several thousand before the 2006 elections, but I don't think he is even contemplating an exit strategy.  He is going to try to hornswaggle the public into thinking he has a plan to end the war, and then after the elections, unless the Dems win one or both houses, it will be back to war as usual.

don't get romantic on vietnam reporting... when i served there, i was all over the country and can state quite confidently that just as much coverage didn't takeplace there as is now not taking place in iraq...

daily i would walk by the verandah bar of the continental palace hotel in saigon (where graham greene sat and wrote novels behind potted palms under the rattan ceiling fans) and listen to marsh clark, then time magazine bureau chief, and his cronies complaining about their air-conditioning being on the fritz and planning what french restaurant they would patronize that evening... earlier that day, they had choppered out to the latest firebase hotspot, taken some photos, done an interview or two, glad-handed the officer in charge, choppered back, handed their notes off to the young staff weenies in the bureau office for typing and transmission to the states, and adjourned for drinks about 3:30... meanwhile, my boss, the senior advisor to the vietnamese chaplaincy and an army chaplain himself, kept busy all day making tons of money in the black market while turning a blind eye to the rampant corruption in the vietnamese chaplain directorates, just one of many under and un-reported stories from vietnam...

but back to iraq... another one of the invisible-to-the-media reports about iraq which i just stumbled across today myself is the carnegie endowment for peace report on pre-war iraq intelligence and wmd... being a fairly reputable outfit, carnegie's statement that the Iraq threat was "systematically misrepresented" in the lead-up to the war and that intelligence was distorted in "wholesale" fashion, seems to have gone mostly unnoticed since its publication w-a-a-a-ay back in January 2004.

A very good description of "the Vietnam narrative as it evolved" and the parallel to Iraq. I saw the article about Congressman Dicks, commended in TPM. He says how wrong it felt to him to be compared to those "peaceniks" who opposed the Vietnam war, when he simply started to find things in Iraq not adding up. But for most Americans, Vietnam was just like that, too.

However, Vietnam, including both the divisions in America over the war and the problem of coming to grips with losing a war, definitely has remained a divisive memory and a symbol, merited or not, of the "culture wars." That persistent sense of loss, shame, or anger is what permitted the Swifties to attack and indeed to harm Kerry, and it's important to remember that it's nonetheless based on a mistaken history from the start, quite apart from the mispresentations of Kerry's record.

One reason for Democrats to articulate a forceful sense of America's purpose is so that this after-stage doesn't recur now with Iraq. Conservatives are going to be playing the "who lost Iraq?" game for a long time to come. We better be able to keep on the offensive so that no one forgets who really lost Iraq: Bush lost it, plus a great deal of America's economic health, military strength, safety from terrorism, and global leadership from the moment he decided to invade. And his conduct ever since did everything it could to make the loss stick.

Todd Gitlin is absolutely right to caution against romanticizing the coverage of Vietnam.

Comparisons are always imperfect.  In the case of Vietnam in order to make a comparison with a war like Iraq, you have to decide when the Vietnam war started.  In Iraq we have a clear starting point, when U.S. troops crossed the border. In Vietnam, I would place the start at the time that Kennedy began to escalate the number of 'advisers,' at the same time covertly escalating their actual combat role.  Others would place the start earlier or later.

Reporting in the early phases was abysmal.  The self-immolation of Buddhist monks protesting the Diem government came as a complete shock to the reporters in Saigon, who spent their time acting as stenographers for military briefers, filing their stories, and then heading for the bar with the rest of the clique.

While there was some muted scepticism of the Diem government earlier, the reporters mostly acquiesced for some time in not reporting the combat role of the 'advisers,' in the suppression of actual news about the state of the war, in being oblivious to the lack of popular support for the government, and in other bad news.  It wasn't until 1963 with the fiasco at Ap Bac, where 5 U.S. helicopters were lost, along with Buddhist monks torching themselves in the street, that much serious reporting in Vietnam started. Most notable were Malcolm Browne of the AP, Neil Sheehan of UPI, and David Halberstam of the Times.  By this time, there were 15,000 'advisers' in Vietnam.

This scepticism was still confined to a few reporters on the ground in Vietnam.  Most of the press continued to reflect the administration line.  One of the few bright spots of the time was the fact that the Times and the wire services mostly stood by their reporters, despite considerable pressure from the Kennedy administration.

Most people remembering the reporting and opposition to the Vietnam war jump ahead many years.  They remember senators as opponents  who were staunch supporters of the war for years.  Remember that only two members of either the House or the Senate voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August of 1964, Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska; 504 Senators and Representatives voted for it.

The reporting was similarly one-sided.  Overall, the press has done significantly better in Iraq, from a much earlier date, though with a full-scale military assault and many more reporters, one could argue that this was the product of circumstances.

Nonetheless, reporters in Iraq have shown a lot more interest in what people in Iraq think and other serious matters than occurred for a long time in Vietnam. 

Anybody else notice that the "peaceniks" were right about Vietnam and Iraq, and those who mocked them were wrong about Vietnam and Iraq.

"the parallel is a lot eerier than I, for one, thought a year or two ago."
Todd, 
With all due respect, you being a "real journalist" and all, but what on earth took you so long? The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq were as obvious a year ago as they are today. (As were the differences, duh.)
What happened to your streetsmarts, my friend?

Yeah, Lindsay, deja vu for sure.  Sometimes the similarities are downright creepy.

so I might as well throw in a bit on Thoreau to further prick your brain. He see much use for much of what was covered in newspapers of his time, and I figure today that he would be even less interested in the details and man-on-the-street quotes from the latest bombing in Baghdad.

For those who were in Indochina during the war, the insider's insider amongst the press corps was Francois Sully.  Francois rose to be Newsweek's Saigon Bureau Chief, but he had covered every Indochina beat since the earliest days of the War.

Sully went to  Vietnam with the French Army in 1945 and was discharged in Saigon in '47.  He started as a stringer for Paris papers while also writing for the Vietnamese press.

Long before the Halberstams and Morley Safers arrived, the Vietnamese and Lao speaking Francois was building hundreds of sources inside the Viet Minh, inside the Palace in Saigon and at grassroots levels in every province in the North and South.

He made everyone in the U.S. hierarchy (both Embassy and MACV) uncomfortable with his ability to get behind the spin at the "follies" as the US press briefings were known.

He was often characterized (unfairly, I think, although I am not sure) as a witting agent of the French Communist Party and sometimes as a witting agent of the government in Hanoi.  But he out-reported everybody.

There was nothing to behold like the titanic struggles between the legendary American Government news-manager in Saigon , Barry Zorthian, and Francois Sully.

I once had the misfortune to get between the two of them when I passed on what later proved to be some well-crafted disinformation from the Vientiane station chief to Sully and Zorthian, learning that I was the source, took me to task in no uncertain terms.

Francois Sully came to a somewhat mysterious end when he fell from (or was pushed from) an American helicopter in Cambodia in 1971.

Barry Zorthian is alive and well in Washington and would be well worth a long interview from an journalist interested in re-capturing the texture and color of the real journalistic scene in Vietnam in the mid-1960's.  Zorthian is a raconteur par excellence, and a tough player of the public affairs game, who makes the contemporary White House and Pentagon spin-meisters look like rank amateurs.

John Stuart Blackton

 First of all, "the peaceniks" were not a solidary group but a mass movement.  Thus, although one gathers that those like El Campesino might cut a lot of slack to what the government was claiming, much of which he still parrots, even though the forces of the state are organized and have vast intelligence resources (to make sure that they don't do things like use 'information' that had already been discredited to make a case for WMDs in Iraq, then claim those who call them liars are themselves liars and revisionists), I think that a little perspective is warranted about the 'peaceniks'.

*The characterization of the Communists as 'peaceful agrarian reformers' at the height of the Vietnam War is a bit of an exaggeration. There might have been some literally claiming that but more likely,  I suppose this is El Campesino's take on what books like Fire in the Lake were arguing.  It is not a fair characterization of what most peace activists, especially the most intelligent or articulate, were saying.

*The 'domino theory' was bunk.  First of all, it was the US that did much to spread the war, especially into Cambodia, and US bombing (and US supported coups like Lon Nol) were pivotal in bringing down the Cambodian government.  There was never any serious threat that Thailand or any other country outside Indochina was ever endangered.

Part of this point about the "domino" theory is by a linguistic sleight of hand.  The term "Vietnam" war was a misnomer, as it was, even from its early stages, and especially under Nixon, an "Indochina" war, and was often so described.  That all of Indochina (with the combined population of Cambodia and Laos totalling less than one sixth of Vietnam as of 1975) would go Communist under the circumstances was never at least the mainstream position of the critics of the domino theory, some of whom were peaceniks and some not.  Let's consider statements like Nixon's "Vietnam is the cork in the bottle of Chinese expansionism" which reflect fairly, in the words of a major Cold War leader, what the "domino theory" was -- the notion that Communism posed a threat that by the very definition of the theory went well beyond Indochina.  Incidentally, it remains entirely unclear that, had the US never intervened to impose the division between North and South Vietnam as a national division, rather than let elections proceed in which the Viet Minh were unbeatable, that the rest of Indochina would even likely be Communist today.  The whole thing is speculative, but the domino theory supposes not merely the consequences of US intervention throughout the Indochina region (on and off the books), but what would happen in the absence of US intervention.

*The idea that the US was only in Vietnam only to protect offshore oil supplies was rarely much more than a rumor, popular among certain circles at the grassroots or the astroturf roots, but I can't think of a single major writer from the Left of that period (Chomsky, Scheer, etc) who embraced it.  Again, remember that in mass movements, rumors can abound and even be planted (and cultivated) with ease.

*The people of Vietnam were generally recognized not as generally ardent supporters of Communism but rather as a largely agrarian society where the people had little sense of loyalty to the regimes propped up by the US and only wanted to farm in peace.  The contrary claim, that the 'freedom loving' people of Vietnam enthusiastically wanted us there and that "Vietnamization" was working,  with a powerful and loyal army built up by the US in South Vietnam -- that is what was bunk.  The fall of South Vietnam, in large part because the corrupt army of South Vietnam had absolutely no strong will to defend their government, but only to save their own skins, was contrary to the predictions of the Vietnam hawks not the much-reviled 'peaceniks'. 

Those advocating peace in the 60s mainly asserted the following:

The US was in Vietnam to protect and promote the geo-strategic interests of empire, and not the 'democratic rights' of the Vietnamese people -- who by an honest democracy were poised to elect a government that Washington considered unacceptable back in 1956

The US intervention in Vietnam, with policies of forcing peasants into strategic hamlets, carpet bombing of much of the country, and systematically torching Vietnamese villages (not just My Lai or even a few such villages, but as the standard procedure of numerous units) was doing grea