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Iraq Unsafe For Journalists

President Bush commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II today at a naval base in Coronado, California. Partially in an attempt to fight back falling approval ratings regarding his handling of the situation in Iraq, he drew comparisons between the Iraq conflict and World War II, and between Sepetember 11 and Pearl Harbor.

Even though the link between the old Iraqi regime and September 11 is tenuous at best, and downright false at worst, President Bush needs to draw such comparisons to try to grow support for staying the course in Iraq. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clear that if Iraq is most like any single conflict in our nation’s history, it’s most likely Vietnam.

According to this report from the Reporters Without Borders organization, sixty seven journalists have died in the two plus years of fighting in Iraq. In the twenty years of the Vietnam war, sixty journalists were killed. Yes, many more journalists are covering the fighting in Iraq than there were covering the fighting in Vietnam, but this statistic goes a long way to showing how rules of war are being thoroughly disrespected in Iraq. In that sense, if no other, Iraq is much more like Vietnam than World War II.

Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska, an Army infantry squad leader during the Vietnam war, recently claimed that as time goes on, more and more parallels emerge between Iraq and Vietnam. He points out that the next six months will give us a much better idea of where this conflict will head in the future.

I do not think any of these Vietnam comparisons are meant to imply that inevitable doom awaits us in Iraq or we will lose thousands more lives there, but it is important to know when we repeat the same mistakes we have made in the past, and it is looking increasingly clear that we are doing just that in Iraq. It reminds me of Albert Einstein’s definition for the word insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”