EDITORIAL - The more I think about it the more I think that the way the United States conducted its losing war in Vietnam in the '60's and '70's was the beginning of the decline of this country as a world power. Oh, I know that this country is regarded as (for the time being anyway) as the world's only superpower. But what good is that appelation if we will not or cannot win a war, if we are all blow and no go.

And that is the current situation with the War on Terror, especially as it is being fought these days not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also on the home front.

We hear talk that Americans do not take the war seriously because as a nation they are not being asked to sacrifice. And there is certainly a great deal of truth to that. But the probem goes deeper.

Since and including Vietnam our wars have been fought as public spectacles. Modern technology and modern attitudes have changed the nature of warfare. And I'm not talking about bombs and guns. I'm talking about coverage of our wars by our news media. I'm talking about the televising of the horrors of war, about the pictures of the dead and the maimed and the dying. I'm talking about news media attitudes which focus not on winning the war but on the costs of war in terms of lives. I'm talking about the daily drumbeat of the media on the negative aspects of the war, the emphasis on the bad, the ignoring of the good, the general approach that the United States is wrong, that when you come right down to it we have no business being where we are or doing what we're doing.

Cris Core, a radio talk show host in our town, and a very good one, suggested the other day that we can't win a war as long as we give the news media free rein to cover it because their negative coverage eventually persuades the public, including members of the congress, not only that the war is unwinnable but also that we're in the wrong and that we, not the enemy, are the real villains. Abu Graib and Guantanamo are examples.

Core suggests that the administration no longer let the news media cover the war since most of their reporting is negative.

Sounds like a good idea, but the problem is, it won't work. You can't put the genii back in the bottle or the toothpaste back in the tube; you can't unscramble the egg and you can't keep the news media out of Iraq. Americans maybe, but not foreign reporters, not the pro-terrorist Al Jazeera.

Imagine, if you will, the outcry from the media, from the Democrats and many Republicans, from the congress if the administration were to talk of barring reporters from the war zone. It won't work.

I have no answer to the problem. You can't call on the media to change its ways in the name of patriotism because most of their members do not think it unpatriotic to emphasize the negative and there is that little thing called "The First Amendment" which gives them coverage.

It boils down to this: Modern technology and modern-day attitudes in the news media, regardless of public support at a war's beginning eventually turn the public against it, regardless of merit of the war or the need to fight and win it.

In the future any administration taking this nation into a war is going to have to figure out a way to keep the public rallied behind it, keep both politcal parties supporting it, keeping convincing the media of the rightness of our cause. And that, my friends, ain't gonna be easy.