The “national security versus the public’s right to know” debate is nothing new to the US, but Bush appears to have lost serious amounts of credibility as key members of the House and Senate openly compare his faith-based requests for secrecy to Johnson’s worst decisions during the Vietnam War. For example Rep Murtha was just on the morning news yesterday and he was asked whether he believes the Bush administration’s assessment of the road ahead. Murtha retorted “Why should I trust him?” He went on to say that he remembers President Johnson’s announcement that he would not let the US pull out of Vietnam as things were about to get better. Murtha said the result was that more than 38,000 soldiers lost their lives before the US could admit that Johnson’s strategy was flawed from the start.
That brought to mind Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, which had a very different take on the situation (the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning). What Nixon lacked in domestic smarts he more than made up for in international relations, and yet he rarely gets mentioned outside of Watergate, which probably means either that the US still has a very long way to go in Iraq or maybe just that the “N” word is considered off-limits:
The other two factors on which we will base our withdrawal decisions are the level of enemy activity and the progress of the training programs of the South Vietnamese forces. And I am glad to be able to report tonight progress on both of these fronts has been greater than we anticipated when we started the program in June for withdrawal. As a result, our timetable for withdrawal is more optimistic now than when we made our first estimates in June. Now, this clearly demonstrates why it is not wise to be frozen in on a fixed timetable.
We must retain the flexibility to base each withdrawal decision on the situation as it is at that time rather than on estimates that are no longer valid.
Along with this optimistic estimate, I must-in all candor-leave one note of caution.
If the level of enemy activity significantly increases we might have to adjust our timetable accordingly.