>http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2583579
>
>President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.
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>Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
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>"He could be right," the president said, before adding, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

The trouble here is that whole day all I heard was quotes from this guy Friedman (Thomas, I think) who is the newfound guru who'll push the slogans for this day. And whenever he has something to say, it'll be repeated dozen times in the next day or two.

Why is this the trouble? Because there's still a lot of those who believe that the Vietnam war was lost in the American kitchens, when wives, neighbors, friends and relatives of the soldiers (when they weren't called troops yet) watched regularly on their TVs what was going on out there. And that's how the support for the war was lost. (I've heard some of this explanation yesterday again)

Now with embedded reporters, and news limited to 10-second segments, when you hear nothing about everything, this reminder serves only as a warning against any attempt to give air time to any serious investigative reporting. One war was lost because of it (or so the mantra goes), don't want to lose another one.

But once this war is lost (or once it becomes clear it is lost), within a year or two there'll be someone with a book analyzing it and coming to the conclusion that this war was also lost in the kitchen. Or maybe it will be blogs this time. All generals are geniuses after the battle.