Like most of what Dr. Sowell writes, it's hard to quote short passages because each paragraph is as good as the last. Here is my best shot:
You cannot fight a war without many brave men taking risks with their lives in order to try to accomplish their mission. Yet can you name a single American hero in either of the two wars going on today in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Chances are you can't -- not if you rely on the mainstream media. You may be able to name someone from the little band of people involved in the prison scandal in Iraq or perhaps Jessica Lynch who was rescued, but not those who rescued her.
There are apparently no heroes among the more than 100,000 men and women fighting for us overseas -- only victims. At least, that is how the news gets filtered and spun in most of the media.
Enemy casualties, no matter how large, seldom get as much publicity as even a handful of American casualties. A whole ghoul school of journalism was preparing for the thousandth death among American troops in Iraq, so that they could run big features on it.
The New York Times covered page after page with the names of those thousand dead. The television wing of the ghoul school did similar things in their broadcasts. The rationale for this is that they are "honoring" the dead troops and perhaps showing that the media, too, are patriotically "supporting our troops."
Those who are busy "honoring" the deaths of American troops in Iraq seldom have much to say about what those troops accomplished.
This is the approach that gave the media their biggest triumph and ego boost -- the discrediting of the war in Vietnam.
More than 50,000 Americans died trying to save that country from Communist attacks. Their achievements included victories on the battlefield that were negated politically by the way the American press reported the war.
In recent years, Vietnam's Communist leaders themselves have admitted that they lost that war on the ground but hung on because the American anti-war movement gave them hope that they could win it politically. It was a well-founded hope that the American media helped make come true when we withdrew both our troops and our financial and political backing for the Vietnamese under attack.
At that time, the media had not yet come up with the gimmick of "honoring" American war dead but they were nevertheless able to throw away the victory for which those men sacrificed their lives.
Will they repeat that heady achievement a second time in Iraq? They certainly seem to be trying. And it is no honor.
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