Fox News' Bill O'Reilly promised his audience "the truth about Iraq" on Thursday, saying that most Americans now feel the war has not been worth the costs, while "the president's argument for sustaining the war is largely theoretical."
O'Reilly turned on his special guest during the segment, White House press secretary Tony Snow, saying, "You can't win ... unless the Iraqi people turn on all the terrorists. And they're not."
O'Reilly said he agreed with the president that defeat in Iraq could harm the US but said that "enough is enough." The populist pundit who, according to his Wikipedia entry hasn't been a registered Republican since 2000, added that the American people are as exhausted by this war as they ultimately were by Vietnam, and also that "the Iraqi government is incompetent and "the people themselves largely ungrateful."
"The whole thing is tragic and depressing, complicated and dangerous," O'Reilly concluded. "After more than four years, Iraq remains a huge stone around America's neck."
O'Reilly then turned to former Fox anchor Snow, who argued that "Iraqi security forces ... are increasingly on the front lines" and that the Iraqi people have chosen the Iraqi government over al Qaeda and are saying "thank you" to the Americans.
As Snow continued to insist that the Iraqis will support the American troops if they seem them standing up to protect them, O'Reilly countered him with the analogy of Vietnam. "We don't have the hearts and minds there," said O'Reilly. "It's like South Vietnam. ... We had a lot of South Vietnamese helping us ... but there wasn't enough of them."
Snow then offered the argument that by remaining in Iraq, the president is fulfilling his responsibility to protect America. He said, "Everybody wishes al Qaeda didn't want to kill us, but they do," and backed that up with the assertion that "you saw that in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago." This was a reference to recent car bomb attacks that British reports have indicated were inspired by but not directly linked to al Qaeda.
Snow finally suggested that Americans are discouraged because, instead of stories about progress in Iraq, "people see scenes of dead American soldiers." However, the New York Times has reported that "A survey last year found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, almost no pictures were published of the American dead in the mainstream print media."
The following video is from Fox's O'Reilly Factor, broadcast on July 12.
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