War In Iraq: He said that "for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us," and that "we are mired in stalemate." It was Walter Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968. And he's at it again.
As Democrats search for words to justify defunding the war in Iraq or imposing restrictions on our constitutionally defined commander in chief, they might revisit Uncle Walter's post-Tet offensive broadcast, when he conned a trusting nation by describing a massive North Vietnamese defeat as a Communist victory.
The "most trusted man in America" said Vietnam was unwinnable. Then-President Lyndon Johnson reportedly told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
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Cronkite: King Tet's deja vu.
Cronkite has called the broadcast, "Report From Vietnam" — and LBJ's reported reaction — one of his proudest moments.
But John Murtha & Co. needn't go back that far. Cronkite, like Jimmy Carter, refuses to leave the public stage and, while experiencing everything, seems to have learned nothing.
The 90-year-old pundit was in San Jose, Calif., last week to proclaim that the war in Iraq is also a "terrible disaster," and "the earlier we get out, the better."
Cronkite opined in an interview with the Bay Area's CBS 5: "Look at the loss of lives of our young Americans there and those who have been maimed for life. For what purpose? No purpose we can define." He says "we're probably less safe," and that the only thing we've accomplished is that the "entire Arab world has put us down as an enemy."
Cronkite and the Democrats were wrong then, and they're wrong now. But in their world of naive appeasement, failure is not only an option, it is the desired result. Iraq is not Vietnam, but they're trying to make it so.
The Viet Cong didn't reach a single one of its objectives and lost most of its 45,000 troops in its attacks on 21 South Vietnamese cities. So massive was its defeat that it convinced Hanoi to send North Vietnamese Army regulars south to carry on the fight.
What Cronkite does not mention is that defeat came not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress, when the "Watergate babies" of 1974 cut off aid to the valiant South Vietnamese who'd been successfully defending their country. The Democrats defunded that war, and they want to defund this one, too.
Cronkite, Murtha et al. seem determined to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, to prove that Osama bin Laden was right when, after Clinton's debacle in Somalia, the bearded one said America was weak and didn't have the stomach to resist.
Cronkite and Murtha mourn our dead while trying to make their sacrifice meaningless. Now that's what we would call "yellow" journalism.
