Iraq War a New Vietnam?

By: Greg Mitchell Coming when it did, the photograph seemed like a cruel joke, or a Photoshop prank. It was last Wednesday morning, just as nearly everyone in America (except perhaps a few Fox News commentators) was awakening to the bone-chilling reality of a quick war that was threatening to turn into a quagmire. And there, splashed across a spread in The New York Times, was a picture of a smiling Donald Rumsfeld bending over to shake the hand of an equally buoyant Robert S. McNamara. Unfortunately, it did not look like McNamara was whispering, "What part of the word Vietnam don't you understand?"

It was a Pentagon luncheon for former defense secretaries hosted by Rumsfeld to discuss the war in Iraq, which seemed to be undergoing more "Vietnamization" by the hour. We had seen it all before: the mass sorties that did not bomb soldiers into submission; the apparently false claims that we had won the "hearts and minds" of the people; the charges that the enemy was not fighting fair; and a rising toll of dead, wounded, or missing military personnel -- and journalists. Still to come was President Bush's announcement that 120,000 more troops were heading to the front.

Of course, it is absurd, on one level, to compare a war of less than two weeks with one that lasted decades. But still, many hear echoes, faint or strong, of Vietnam. Only a few days have passed since CNN's Walter Rodgers, in Iraq in the early moments of the war, told anchor Aaron Brown, "It's great fun," but that seems like a year ago now.

With the conflict under way -- and getting nastier -- we thought we'd check back with some well-known reporters we had visited during the long run-up to war.

As with Vietnam, too many in the press follow the Pentagon line, says Joseph L. Galloway, the Bronze Star winner and author who is now military-affairs correspondent for Knight Ridder. "One thing not lacking," he adds, dryly, "is optimism for the game plan, but if it hasn't been cleared with the enemy, it tends not to work." He called the press briefings "bullshit." (By one count, the military announced the "taking" of Umm Qasr four times, and Basra twice.)

Tom Wicker, columnist for The New York Times from 1966 to 1991, tells us, "It's beginning to look ominously like Vietnam." He wonders why more didn't question earlier Rumsfeld's plan for a lighter and quicker force in Iraq when many generals were predicting the war would have to be won with more boots on the ground. "Journalists," he says, "share the common perception that technology will triumph."

Even so, Sydney H. Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia (later depicted in the movie The Killing Fields), cautions against embracing the Vietnam analogy too tightly. No one predicted a quick victory in Vietnam, he points out, and "desert war is not jungle war." Like Galloway, he feels the press briefings are useless ("editors should send robots with tape recorders"), but reporters should stop "grumbling" about them, because "generals are doing what they do, and what you would do in their position."

Still, he feels "we're not getting as much disinformation as we got in Vietnam. When you've got reporters traveling with the troops, it's hard to carry off." While the embedding process offers reporters only a slice of the war, not the whole of it, at least "we know very quickly the misjudgments at the top, so we're way ahead of Vietnam in that." If there were no embedded reporters, he wonders "if we would have gotten the full picture" of the deadly fragging incident in the first weekend of the war.

But John R. "Rick" MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of an important book about media coverage of the first Gulf War, warns that if the war goes on for months, you "could see a breakdown in the discipline of the Pentagon's control of coverage. The soldiers may start to become paranoid about the reporters, and the reporters angry they're getting lied to by officers. Maybe more embedded reporters will be emboldened to report what they see, and then there might be reprisals from the military, revoking privileges."

If the war lingers, many believe veteran war correspondents will stick it out and many rookies will flee. But MacArthur advises: "Don't count out the 'green' reporters. Frequently, they can be better than the seasoned pros, because what they see has greater impact on them, they're still shocked by it. Some of the best reporters in Vietnam were the greenest -- Gloria Emerson had been covering fashion in Paris. Raw emotion can be very effective."
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