Yesterday was a day of mayhem in Iraq which led to the deaths of two CBS News employees, and a day of mayhem in Afghanistan. The stories, of course, are very real. Millions of Americans will read one or both this morning. How many of them will conclude that it is useless to try and help Muslims live in freedom? How many will conclude that it is a waste of our money and our children's lives to continue with these obviously flawed endeavors? This is how the manner of reporting the news of the war is having an impact on American public opinion. This was true in Korea and Vietnam, but was not true in WWII. The reason? Wartime measures like censorship and propaganda, which were considered absolutely necessary in the declared wars against Germany and Japan, but not in the "conflicts" or "police actions" of Korea and Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it any wonder, seeing every night and reading every morning about the carnage of war, that the morale of the general public continues to drop and, with it, their support for the continuation of the war? How long can our political leaders continue with an unpopular war in Iraq, and a forgotten war in Afghanistan that may soon become unpopular with every instance of Afghans rioting against the presence of our troops in their country?

Speaking of Korea, we now know our leaders expressly approved of a policy of shooting refugees in the chaotic days at the beginning of the war. War is an ugly thing. Our troops feared, with great justification, that North Korean troops were using the masses of refugees as cover to move forward and infiltrate into our lines (the Chinese later used this tactic as well with some success in the fighting retreat of U.S. Marines from the Chosin Reservoir). Perhaps the troops could have been safeguarded without using such a brutal tactic. Perhaps we could have saved a lot of American lives (50,000 or so) if we had simply evacuated Korea. Of course, the whole peninsula would now be as dark as the North is each night, but our boys would have lived and not been forced to commit war crimes.