On enemy propaganda, Pentagon tells it like it is

Three cheers for Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman! With top White House officials acting like henpecked husbands as they quaver in fear of upsetting the Senate Armed Services Committee majority, the Pentagon policy chief tells it like it is.

He told a very prominent and very aggressive senator that her campaign rhetoric “reinforces enemy propaganda.”

It’s about time the administration took on the people who are trying to do to Iraq what they did to South Vietnam: run their mouths without a care about how they might play into the enemy’s propaganda strategy.

Edelman told presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that her cut-and-run talk was helping the enemy. “Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Edelman said in a June 16 letter obtained by the Associated Press.

The cut-and-run rhetoric opened the way for the Hanoi communists to conquer South Vietnam. It rewarded Hezbollah for killing more than 240 of our servicemen in a single Beirut attack. And it gave Islamist thugs the confidence that by brutalizing the dead bodies of our Army Rangers on CNN, we would become demoralized and quit. Just as it is encouraging the Islamist terrorists to murder our servicemen every day in Iraq with roadside bombs.

“Such talk,” Edelman warned Clinton, “understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.” If the Senate majority party is working as hard as it can to force us to withdraw, then why should our nominal Iraqi allies cooperate with us? And why should the enemy let up its made-for-TV attacks?

Calling Edelman’s comments “at once outrageous and dangerous,” Clinton’s office says the senator is going to complain to Edelman’s immediate boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.