Times Call for New Pentagon Papers

What we need is riots in the streets and all hell to break loose.

Seems that is about the only thing that gets anyone's freakin' attention!

Times Call for New Pentagon Papers:

According to recent opinion polls, most Iraqis don't believe that we're making things better or safer in their country. What does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq?

What does it mean for continued American patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?

Questions very much like these nagged at my conscience at the height of the Vietnam War, and led, eventually, to the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971, 35 years ago.

As a former Marine commander and defense analyst in 1970, I had exclusive access to highly classified defense documents for research purposes. They constituted a 47-volume, top-secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam titled U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68. The Pentagon Papers made it very clear that I, like the rest of the American public, had been misled about the origins and purposes of the war I had participated in. Today's troops in Iraq have also been misled, as 85 percent of them believed, according to a Zogby poll from March, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was allied with al-Qaeda.

That period had several other similarities to this one.