The War for Public Opinion (Yes, it does appear to be Vietnam Version 2.1)

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49260-2003Oct31.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson, delivered the annual Theodore H. White lecture last week at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, so it was inevitable that the panel following his talk was confronted with a question about the comparison between Johnson's experience with Vietnam and President Bush's travails in Iraq.

Fortunately for the journalists who were sitting there, Ernest May, the distinguished professor of American history at Harvard, was called on to respond. May is a notably careful and hardheaded scholar who over the years has been a frequent consultant to the National Security Council and the Department of Defense and is currently an adviser to the intelligence establishment.

Speaking on the morning after Bush's news conference defense of his policy in Iraq and the progress he claimed for that country, and on a day when the headlines told of fresh violence and additional casualties in Iraq, May did not mince words. The gap between official assessments of the situation and reports from the ground is "eerily reminiscent" of the Vietnam era. We know that the "credibility gap" in Vietnam was real, May said; what we don't know at this moment is whether the "crumbling" in Iraq is as pervasive as it proved to be in Vietnam.

The mere fact that a student of national security as dispassionate, nonhysterical and informed as Ernie May would not reject the Vietnam comparison out of hand speaks volumes. It adds to the impression left by Bush's news conference that we have entered a new and politically risky stage of the Iraq conflict.

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