freeSpeech: Bob Schieffer

From the beginning, there were those who saw Iraq as another Vietnam. I wasn't one of them because I saw Vietnam up close.

During the Cold War, we chose Vietnam as the place to draw a line and tell the Communists once and for all they could not cross it. Whatever Iraq is, it was never that.

But I am beginning to see parallels in the remarkably similar way the government then and the government now reports war news. During Vietnam, the government was on a never-ending search for good news. Victory was always just around the corner. Over and over, there were sightings of that light at the end of the tunnel.

In 1964, a senator returned from the war zone and declared, "we are winning and everybody knows it but Americans." Sound familiar?

Mostly, the government just overwhelmed us with statistics to prove that we were winning - body counts, enemy bunkers destroyed. Some were right, some wrong, but all proved irrelevant.

I was reminded of that when the American command in Iraq released statistics showing the number of Iraqi civilians who had died violently in Baghdad had been reduced by half between July and August, but when questioned about it, conceded the numbers did not include those killed by bombs and rockets.

Iraq and Vietnam. Two different wars, but when the government spin machine starts spinning, it is hard to tell the difference.

Sadly, there is no difference on one point: We went to Vietnam with good intentions and a bad plan. We may have managed to do the same thing in Iraq.

Bob Schieffer is broadcast journalism's most experienced Washington reporter. He is CBS News' Chief Washington Correspondent and also serves as anchor and moderator of Face The Nation, CBS News' Sunday public affairs broadcast.

Schieffer served as interim anchor of The CBS Evening News from March 10, 2005 until Aug. 31, 2006. He will be a regular contributor to The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.