insein
Senior Member
You think that because then, as now, there was a badly run war for badly run reasons with brave troops being sacrificed for the vanity of a few in power. And in both cases, the flow of information, giving people a chance to make a reasonable assessment of the situation, resulted in the unpopularity of the war.
That said, I think both then and now, had overwhelming force been used originally, the war would have been much different.
Absolutely! Now why couldnt we use "overwhelming force" to annhilate the enemy and end the war sooner? Because the media that was there kpet reporting the bloodshed and horror of the battlefield to the people in America. The protestors of Vietnam called our soldiers baby-killers, rapists and murderers from what they saw and had reported to them from the media at the time. The Media managed to end a war in defeat because politicians didnt want negative headlines instead of just killing the enemy and ending the war. Politicians got involved because people were outraged at what they saw on tv and read in the papers.
That is exactly what is happening today. Every death is reported like a raffle giveaway on the nightly news. Every car bomb shown is another shot at the American Psyche and its ability to handle the task that we must undertake. Every new manufactured "Scandal" like Abu Gharib just eats away at any moral backbone our nation had and weakens their will to do what must be done. The enemy knows that they can't possibly win if America just rolled through and destroyed them. They do know that with our media, they can make it seem like we're the enemy to the world though and that we are picking on the poor, innocent terrorists who just want to kill those who don't believe their religion in peace. IS that too much to ask?