HISTORIAN PAUL JOHNSON refers to the American left's behavior during the Vietnam War as "America's suicide attempt." The firing of NBC reporter Peter Arnett this week proves the nation has fully recovered. Now we don't have to wait 20 years for a history book to tell us that Walter Cronkite lied about the Viet Cong's Tet offensive being a smashing success. The sedition lobby can't compete with the truth available in the new media.

As American servicemen swept through Iraq, securing oil fields, rescuing POWs, risking their own lives to protect Iraqi civilians, Peter Arnett went on Iraqi television – the propaganda arm of the enemy – to proclaim that the Americans' "war plan has failed."

Though U.S. forces were in shambles, Arnett cheerfully reported, the Iraqi regime was in good shape. He rambled on and on about "the determination of the Iraqi forces, the determination of the government, and the willingness to fight for their country."

Arnett also bragged about the demoralizing effect his reporting was having back home: "Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments."

Any journalist who boasted that his reports were helping demoralize the enemy the way Arnett was boasting that his reports were demoralizing his own country would be brought before the Columbia School of Journalism on ethics charges. What journalists mean by "objectivity" is: relentlessly attacking your own country while engaging in mindless boosterism of the enemy. At least now we know.

With three U.S. journalists missing and believed kidnapped by the Iraqis, Arnett praised the way the Iraqi regime treats journalists: "I've met unfailing courtesy and cooperation, courtesy from your people and cooperation from the Ministry of Information." The Italian government treated Ezra Pound pretty well, too.

Days before Arnett's boffo appearance on Iraqi television, he was on NBC's "Today" show, saying how well American and British POWs were being treated. At that point, videos of the POWs had been posted on the Drudge Report. Across the globe, anyone with a modem could see that POWs had been shot execution-style, their pants pulled down and their corpses defiled. Yet Arnett assured viewers that "President Saddam Hussein had personally ordered that these prisoners be treated well. ... Saddam wants them given the best medicine and the best food."

Arnett's most comical promotion of enemy propaganda came during the first Gulf War in 1991. The Iraqis claimed a chemical weapons factory bombed by the Americans was an infant-milk factory. To prove it, they produced scores of workers with uniforms stamped with "BABY MILK FACTORY" – written in English. Arnett somberly reported that the United States had bombed a baby-milk factory, remarking that the factory "had been producing 20 tons of powdered milk a day and was the only source of infant formula food for children 1 year and younger in Iraq."

As usual, Arnett went the extra mile, adding his own credibility to the preposterous "milk factory" story, saying the plant "looked innocent enough, from what I could see." When pressed by a CNN anchor quoting a U.S. military spokesman who said the plant had been heavily guarded and was "associated with biological warfare production," Arnett insisted that the plant had only one guard at the gate when he arrived and that workers were "bringing out a cart full of powdered milk."

Arnett's report on the "milk factory" was such a joke that the New York Times later tried to cover for him with an extraordinary rendition of the facts. William Prochnau wrote an article in the Times magazine stating: "Arnett, never a sucker for anyone's official line, had gone to great pains to point out (slipping it by the censor at his elbow) that the factory's 'baby milk' signs were printed in English."

Alas, the facts did not fit the Times' Herculean defense of their boy. Weeks after his report, Arnett gave an interview to Newsweek magazine in which he was still doggedly insisting that the plant was a baby-formula factory. "I think that was a mistaken bombing ... I think the U.S. just miscalled it. ... There was no doubt in my mind that it was unlikely to be a supersecret facility ... I just cannot conceive [of their having] the limited kind of security that they had if it was such a secret installation."

Arnett even had an innocent (and incoherent) explanation for the English-language signs, which, he said, "seemed to make sense to me." So much for – as the New York Times put it – Arnett not being "a sucker for anyone's official line." (Arnett's original report for CNN is not available on Lexis-Nexis. But in dozens of accounts of his notorious broadcast, only in the Times' account is it Arnett who points out that the signs were in English.)

In response to Arnett's most recent foray into enemy propaganda, the Times was again doing defense work for a traitor. Walter Cronkite praised Arnett on the op-ed page for "his knowledgeable dispatches" – simply ignoring that every "fact" reported by Arnett on his Iraqi broadcast was demonstrably false.

Amazingly, Cronkite also claimed that it was "conceivable" that Arnett's warm relationship with the enemy was "of some value to our own military." Only when reporters act as tools of the enemy's propaganda do we hear about the great help they are giving the U.S. military. Normally, journalists denounce such services to their country as a violation of their famed "objectivity."

Thirty years ago, Arnett would have won a Pulitzer Prize for his seditious performance in Iraq – as he did for similarly accurate reporting on the Vietnam War. NBC initially tried to stand by him, but the reaction of the American people was too strong this time. The sedition lobby had a good long run, but their ascendancy is over.

God... Coulter is sooo smart. Thank our Lord Jesus Christ that she's on our side. And thank the Lord that we have such a brave, smart, and good pResident like George W. Bush! Our Prezident will vanquish all the evil doers in Iraq... and then get rid of them in all the other dark corners of the world. Then ALL the world will be just like America... Free and Christian! Oh thank goodness for our president and all the good Crhistian men around him. Onward Christian Soldgers!

Viet Cong won you imbiciles, and your type lost, they deserve to be admired. Should also take time to learn how to spell. it might come in handy if you ever get any literate friends.

good thing we have oil, cause we no longer deserve free speech huh? Wait, we don't have the oil, the Iraqi's don't have the oil, who has it?

Oh yeah, the pirates of skull and bones, no American flag for them, they prefer to "rape, pillage and kill, " just like the soldiers sing! How stupid do you think the public is? Conyers already asked for all the conflict of interest evidence, and believe me, it's there, it's too big to even cover up. Guess who's gonna be hangin with Mumia soon? Wacko's don't stay in Waco, they move to the whitehouse if you don't get rid of em.

Anyone who has any real knowledge of the Vietnam war must know that it was an immoral war devoid of any ethical justification. Thousands of Americans died trying to support the dictator Diem (and his successors) who is on record as stated his hero was Hitler.

You cannot rewrite history. America pushed the patriot, Ho, into the communist camp. At one time Ho actually asked if Vietnam could be 'a remote State of America' but America backed the French instead, in their criminal occupation.

VC won some territory but In the end neither the USA or China needed vietnam anyway - they just wasted a whole lot of perfectly good soldiers.

the US was "defeated" by firstly its own government (which put restrictions on the way in which it could wage war.. and then by the public that forced them to withdraw.

It was more a shift in strategy than a military defeat.

This is as clear a case of jealousy as I have seen in print in quite awhile. Poor ann has nowhere near the integrity, courage, or awareness as other journalists and so she resorts to venomous attacks and pontifications that stem only from a misreading of history, which she hollowly attempts to legitimize with an absurd logic based on the seperation of people into an 'us and them'. It is always easy for the media, or any person or organization, to attack one than to engage in true self-reflection. It is always easier to be an apologist for brutality than a proponent for justice and reason. Bottom line is that her venom reflects only the intense self-hatred of the right wing towards American principles of justice. If it stemed only from ideology that would be one thing, but I suspect there is a bit of jealousy in the mix here as well.

The only solution to these pathetic attempts to rewrite history and enforce a reality akin to the Orwellian terms of dystopia is to pour more money into the space program rather than building more death weapons and get these psychos off planet earth as soon as possible.

"The Iraqis claimed a chemical weapons factory bombed by the Americans was an infant-milk factory."

A few days later, a spokesperson for Nestle confirmed in a letter to the New York Times that the facility was in fact a baby formula factory, built to completion. Shortly after it was bombed into rubble, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited the site and was videotaped picking up a sealed packet of the powdered formula, opening it and tasting it.

Annie hit the nail right on the thumb. Among other stories she conveniently ignored were plans in past and present invasions of Iraq to destroy fresh water supplies that would have been mixed with powdered formula. (Evidently Annie's pro-life stance only applies to forcing pregnant women to term.)

As far as the totally irrelevant fixation on Vietnam: error in unum, error in omnium.

Its an evil Swiss conspiracy!
Lucky the US found out about it and bombed them.

"Paris - Manufacturers of powdered baby milk, including food giants Danone of France and Nestle of Switzerland, frequently violate an international code of conduct when they sell their products in west Africa, a study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) says.

The code aims at ensuring that infant formula is not aggressively marketed in poor countries with the use of gifts, glitzy claims or misinformation that could prejudice breast milk, which is far more nutritious for a newborn, as well as free


Obviously, Saddam wasn't creating Chemical weapons. Instead, he was in an even more vile conspiracy to wean babies off of their mother's milk, and lure their mothers into switching over to formula. "