Other Columns by Cliff Kincaid
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Some conservatives have been complaining that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans have been AWOL in the public relations war over Iraq. On Veterans Day, a counter-attack of some sort was launched. President Bush defended himself by saying, in effect, that Democrats used the same intelligence from the CIA that he did.

Bush's biggest mistake, of course, was in retaining Clinton's director of the CIA, George Tenet, who told him that it was a "slam dunk" that the U.S. would find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. For some reason, however, the CIA escapes accountability. Incredibly, Bush even gave Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom after he resigned.

As part of this new public relations strategy, the Republican Party has produced a video of leading Democrats declaring Saddam to be a serious threat to America and having WMD. But how will drawing attention to liberal flip-floppers save the Iraq policy?

Think about Bush's charge. He's basically saying that the Democrats are wrong to say that he deliberately misled the nation. He's saying that if he made a mistake, they did too, and they were as incompetent and wrong as he was. This admission only whets the appetite of the sharks in the media. They sense weakness on the President's part.

AIM has produced an excellent film, Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope , which makes a positive case for the invasion of Iraq. It sets the record straight on a series of media myths. But the administration has been reluctant to take on the media. It will take on the opposition party but only in the sense of saying that they were as wrong about WMD in Iraq as the Republicans were. This is a losing strategy.

The AIM film, produced by AIM media analyst Roger Aronoff, has its Washington, D.C. screening on Thursday night. The American University Foreign Policy Association, Capitol Conservatives, and Accuracy in Media are hosting the D.C. premiere at 7:30 p.m. on American University's Campus. This film deserves a national audience.

One of the points I make in the film is that we have to be brutally honest about the intentions of some of those opposed to the Iraq War policy. I note that leftist filmmaker Michael Moore has openly praised the Iraqi insurgents as the equivalent of America's revolutionary war heroes.

In other words, Moore wants the other side to win.

Among prominent Republicans, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been virtually alone in saying that there is an organized element in the Democratic Party that wants the U.S. to fail in Iraq.

Gingrich is a partisan Republican, but his point is validated by the actions of the Democratic Party during the Vietnam War. The war in Vietnam was launched by the Hanoi communists and the U.S. responded under two Democratic Presidents, John F. Kennedy and LBJ. But when Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford took control of the White House, the Democratic-controlled Congress undermined the U.S. side of the war by talking about deadlines in getting out and eventually cutting funds to our South Vietnamese allies. South Vietnam collapsed and millions died.

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