The controversial NYT opinion piece by an Arkansas senator failed to make a persuasive case for military intervention in US cities and suffered from 'factual inaccuracies and historical analogies that make scant sense,' writes Peter Bergen for CNNOpinion
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is"Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, a military veteran who is close to President Trump and who is sometimes mentioned as a future US defense secretary, wrote an op-ed Wednesday in the New York Times under the headline,"Send in the Troops' in which he made the case that federal troops are needed to stamp out"anarchy" caused by the protests sweeping the United States that Cotton claimed recalls"the widespread violence of the 1960s.
But this comparison is off base. The riots that racked US cities in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. were of a far deadlier and more destructive nature than the occasionally violent protests we have seen during the past week. In 1968, more more than 40 were killed, according to the Atlantic. I write only three blocks away from 14th Street NW in Washington DC, a key commercial corridor, much of which went up in flames during the 1968 riots.
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