Walter Cronkite has told a group of reporters that he believes the U.S. should take its military out of Iraq immediately.
This is not the first time Cronkite has spoken out against the war. In 2004 he opined that the invasion and occupation did not make, are not making, and can not make the U.S. safer.
It is high time that question were debated in-depth, in public.
Bush never specifically addresses serious criticism of his Iraq war. Many hundreds if not thousands of well-thought-out and well-articulated articles detailing how the war is harmful to U.S. security have appeared; not once has Bush mentioned their points and rebutted them.
Public debate on this question should be substantive but has instead been reduced to sound bites. The pro-war element of society is also the one with the tallest soapbox at present and it does not mind bullying from the summit of that soapbox. This is no way of discussing and deciding gravely serious matters.
One can not make a thing true by asserting it over and over. If I say that the entire sky is completely magenta at noon once, or if I say that one million times, it is equally and self-evidently untrue. Equally ridiculous is the claim that Iraq was an imminent danger to the U.S. at the time of Bush’s attack. And the notion that we could not defend our borders against insurgents from Iraq if we were not fighting them off in Iraq is equally spurious.
On the one hand, Walter Cronkite does not wield the same influence he did when working as a nightly newscaster. It should be noted that in 1968, at his boss’s urging, he declared that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and that the U.S. should pull out of it. President Johnson recognized that in losing Cronkite, he had lost “middle America.”
On the other hand, though, Cronkite is a respected figure, and somebody who does not comment in a frivolous manner on urgent matters. It is to be hoped that his current commentary encourages more Americans to give the questions surrounding Bush’s invasion of Iraq their due consideration.