MSM Despair

When that great bastion of Freedom of the Press and Defender of the First Amendment, the New York Times, declared that Iraq is in a civil war, many other liberal/leftist members of the media wing of the Democrat party jumped on that statement with glee. Tim Russert appeared to be positively euphoric (I could substitute a crude word often used by Rush Limbaugh, but I am not a crude person).

Iraq is obviously not in a civil war, but rather engaged in revenge and retaliation. Shiites think they're finally in a position to right the wrongs the Sunnis inflicted on them over the last 1,300 years. Maliki, a shiite, aligns himself with Muqtada al Sadr, the murderous shiite head of the Mahdi army, in the belief that only al Sadr can protect him from the sunnis. It is a war of religious factions of the same murderous religion. If the Kurds join in, maybe we can then say it is a civil war.

During the three worst years of the Vietnam war I was assigned to an intelligence processing unit. While Jane Fonda, the Berrigans, William Sloane Coffin and other leftists, communists and traitors were given headlines and TV time daily, the U.S. government hardly ever used the information at hand to try to swing public opinion to the other side. When Morley Safer on the CBS Evening News ran footage of a GI using a Zippo lighter to set fire to a VC hooch, or the New York Times put on the front page the photo of the South Vietnamese girl running naked down the highway after her clothes had been blown off by a bomb blast, the U.S. government had no reply. The reports I was seeing and processing through computers three times daily for three years were similar to this:
"Fifteen VC entered village, rounded up villagers, raped village chief's wife and four daughters and then tied the chiefs arms and legs to four water buffalo and drove them off in four different directions."

I don't remember ever seeing any of those incidents on the CBS Evening News or in any newspaper. We updated the files three times a day, printed them out at 1 A.M., sent the printouts under armed courier to CincPac and never heard from them again. Do you think the American public may have exhibited a little more sentiment to our side if they had seen these reports? Instead, they were subjected to liberal and pro-communist propaganda everyday, all day.

Is the same thing happening today in Iraq?