The new media offensive for the Iraq war.

In the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, the American media establishment has launched a major offensive against a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq.

In this latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the United States--the front page of the New York Times.

Under the headline "Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say," the November 15 front page of the Times prominently featured a "Military Analysis" by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops should begin within four to six months, "this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts, and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policies."

Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper's CNN show, stating in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout. If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against it, he or she would be quickly reprimanded and likely taken off the beat. But the paper's news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the national security state.

The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. During the years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to Vietnam. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the media coverage of both wars.

Contrary to popular myth, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a U.S. pullout from Vietman. The lag time amounted to several years--and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps one million more Vietnamese people.

A survey by the Boston Globe conducted in February 1968 found that out of thirty-nine major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. Today--despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election--advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites, whose evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate. Many journalists are simply retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And, we're told, the Democrats who'll be running Congress wouldn't--and shouldn't--dare go that far if they know what's good for them.

Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not Congress. Pondering that assumption, I'm reminded of old footage of the CBS program Face the Nation. The show's host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: "Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy."

"Couldn't be more wrong," Senator Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. "You couldn't make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old Fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That's nonsense"

Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, "To whom does it belong then, Senator?" Morse didn't miss a beat: "It belongs to the American people ... and I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy."

Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. While rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War, stating prophetically: "We're going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it."

Norman Solomon's latest book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com