These days, media coverage of US policy in Iraq often seems to be little more than a remake of how news media portrayed Washington’s options for the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the US war effort must go on.

During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq with the Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the US media coverage of both wars.

Whether in 1968 or in 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray swift withdrawal of US troops as impractical and unrealistic.

Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a US pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years — and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps one million more Vietnamese people.

I often think of a survey that the Boston Globe conducted in February 1968; out of 39 major daily newspapers in the USA, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today — despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election — advocacy of a US pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among the modern-day media elite.

The media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road.

The careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivening debate.

Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.

Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for US war-making rests with the president, not the Congress. These days, every time I hear that view expressed, I think of 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”

“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”

Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”

Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back — and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”

The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”

Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

Morse, who was Oregon’s senior senator, could have easily avoided making waves in news media. But he was passionate about the US Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, Morse spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War.

At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.” During the waning days of autumn 2006, the dominant messages from the US mass media continue to insist that Congress cannot, should not and must not push for complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. We’ve seen this kind of dreadful real-life movie before. The longer it goes on, the bigger the tragedy.

— Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback.