The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.
Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html
And on general MANPADS:
Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems.
People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
The only part of US society with any experience at all going into this in 2003 was the military, due to KFOR/Kosovo, and even that was exceedingly limited. Arguably, if the US had more experience in 2003, it might have been less willing to go into Iraq at all.
There were people who were just 100% anti-war in general, or anti Bush, or whatever, but because they were always screaming the same thing, they could be easily ignored -- kind of like calling every single death in a war murder, it degrades the term murder and makes actual murder much cheaper as a result.
Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com) was probably the first to say things were actually going badly from 2003-2005, and then to document the surge and "awakening" which won Iraq.
No one really won (well, the Kurds, and maybe Iran), but sometimes making something really bad suck less is a victory. Given that the people who architected the turnaround were not the people who started it, I'd say they did a pretty good job with what they were given.
Why is that any sane person who dares to criticize the U.S. foreign policy is labeled as "traitor", when the true traitors were the congressmen who failed to check the executive branch, the intelligence agencies' employees who could but did not blow the whistle, and overall the American people who engaged in hysteria and madness and abstained from rational thought after the 9/11 attacks.
Yon takes good photos, and he provides some interesting stories at the tactical level. But he's kind of completely clueless about the grand plan. He's nothing more than a "useful idiot", cheering for a campaign from which he gains very little.
If I may ask, what were you expecting? US Marines sacrificing Iraqi babies and drinking their blood?
EDIT: Added new phrase after the last comma
There were definitely a bunch of cases of needless (in retrospect) killing, but those were generally mistakes, vs. conscious policy. Given that it is a war zone, and information is imperfect, but that inaction would have its own costs, I haven't seen a lot of cases of seriously bad activity. There is also a gray zone between illegal and unjustified; the few genuinely illegal actions have generally been prosecuted and punished by the military. There were other cases where "bad" things happened which were not illegal, but where the policy was changed as a result to prevent those things.
For instance, due to the incidents such as the madrasa night attack in J-Bad, special operations night raids were sharply limited in 2009 (per GEN McChrystal), and the rules for the use of airstrikes and artillery fires were substantially tightened.
Internal to the military, people don't really cover up this information -- it feels into the process of changing policies. Compared to most companies, lower ranking military people are fairly willing to report bad news up the chain of command (still not perfect, but more so). Almost all of this is "hidden" behind security classification, maybe too much so -- which makes people outside the military assume mistakes are intentional and not being corrected. There is a compelling argument for aggressively declassifying information as quickly as possible, positive or negative.
There are a lot more embedded reporters now than there were in Vietnam. The main difference with Vietnam was the draft. For almost all Americans, the wars now are something on TV which happens to other people, which they might feel intellectually one way or the other about, but which has very little direct impact.
The reason there is no news reporting of numerous horrible atrocities committed by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that...there haven't been (m)any. There have been potentially needless but non-criminal incidents, and accidents, which are documented. There have not been many genuine crimes. (I believe there were more in Iraq than there have been in Afghanistan; in Iraq there was a military unit running a brothel, several cases of detainees potentially being abused, etc.)
The crime in Afghanistan and Iraq, if any, is that we're wasting huge amounts of "blood and treasure" for a mission which isn't in the US vital national interest. As far as how the actual war is being conducted, it's about as bloodless as an occupation can be. We're effectively trading combat effectiveness and huge amounts of money for casualties on both sides.
However, I think you really overestimate the downrange reporting coming from Vietnam (I don't know how old you are; the war was over before I was born, so I only read about it after the fact).
There was definitely a lot of focus on US casualties. We were losing about 300 per week, whereas now it is more like 300 per quarter or per year.
The main difference was in Vietnam, the journalists had free reign to go anywhere in the allied area they wished; in Iraq/Afghanistan, reporters are generally embedded with a specific unit. Maybe psychologically embedding with the unit makes reports identify with the soldiers more.
The only really stunning difference between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan was down to Walter Cronkite giving his opinion that the war would end in stalemate. I don't think very many other Vietnam war reporters (from Vietnam; not US based) gave personal commentary like that. I think that is down to Walter Cronkite as a person, and that he had experience with a previous war (he flew on bombers and covered landings during WW2) before reporting on Vietnam. None of the embedded reporters in Afghanistan or Iraq covered a major war other than Gulf War I before (Anderson Cooper, Geraldo, Christiane Amanpour, etc.)