Looking for a Vietnam, media misses the real stories in Iraq

Good article in NRO on the war coverage.

It seems a media gospel that every conflict must be compared to Vietnam sooner or later, so anything that could prompt the analogy triggers a flashback to the '60s. Forget that the size of the conflict, the global context, the weapons, doctrine, force structure, domestic context, terrain, motivation, and practically every other point of comparison are different. The key variable is the same — reporters looking for a storyline, a hook, something to say when they've run out of critiques. A Vietnam story is a form of analytical autopilot, usually negative, almost always misguided.

Back in April i suggested that more than laziness was involved:

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.