This comes much closer to the capturing the conflict than the Goldberg piece and gets at something more important: The disconnect between a professional military and the society it serves.

Absolutely 100 percent correct, and we'd better fix it soon before the Military Industrial Complex feeding off an all professional military devours all of us instead.

It made no difference.

We have bought into the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). If you would like to read how this happens please see:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

Through a combination of public apathy and threats by the MIC we have let the SYSTEM get too large. It is now a SYSTEMIC problem and the SYSTEM is out of control. Government and industry are merging and that is very dangerous.

There is no conspiracy. The SYSTEM has gotten so big that those who make it up and run it day to day in industry and government simply are perpetuating their existance.

The politicians rely on them for details and recommendations because they cannot possibly grasp the nuances of the environment and the BIG SYSTEM.

So, the system has to go bust and then be re-scaled, fixed and re-designed to run efficiently and prudently, just like any other big machine that runs poorly or becomes obsolete or dangerous.

This situation will right itself through trauma. I see a government ENRON on the horizon, with an associated house cleaning.

The next president will come and go along with his appointees and politicos. The event to watch is the collapse of the MIC.

For more details see:

http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html

This comes much closer to the capturing the conflict than the Goldberg piece and gets at something more important: The disconnect between a professional military and the society it serves.

Indeed and that to some extent plays into the idea of soldiers as victims, because to the rest of us it seems they are really victims- victims of some inability to integrate into society on some level that leaves them alienated such that they choose to do things most of us find unimaginable if not repellant. That or that they are victims of a military that actively recruits through the use of psychological manipulation and outright lies.

To those who do not choose "to serve" that choice does indeed seem to be almost an unfortunate condition, like being born autistic. It seems like an indication of something deeply wrong in the person's psyche.

Notice I repeatedly use the term "seems." These are impressions, not facts. Nor are those impressions universal. Although there is a certain amount of frankly deserved scorn directed towards those who at least claim to understand and revere the military while choosing not to themselves (barring some real medical reason).

Goldberg noted, for example, that Walter Cronkite and his fellows wore military uniforms as part of a war correspondents corps; that idea seems at best quaint and probably simply mindboggling today.

Not just mindboggling- utterly dangerous and irresponsible. The journalists are there to monitor the events (and by extenion the military) not to support them. A very important reason to put reporters in the warzone is to specifically to keep the leash on the hounds.

Worse, we quite often conflate heroism and victimhood. Take, for example, those killed by terrorists in the September 11 attacks. They’re treated almost universally a heroes, with the twin towers dubbed as “hallowed ground.” Yet the vast majority of those who died that day were mere tragic victims, ordinary folks who just went to work that day to collect a paycheck and were murdered in a particularly public way. The heroes that day were the police officers and firefighters who risked their lives going into burning buildings to save others.

Now that's true.

My instinct is that Kaplan is wrong in his judgment that the trend toward cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism is reversible.

Why would you want to? What good has come from nationalism to balance out the endless evil?

Laura Rosen links the piece approvingly and it is a well done piece of reporting. But it misses the larger point: These people chose their calling.

As a poster above points out people in the national guard usually are joining to be a domestic emergency response force, not to be foreign invaders for years at a time. Maybe that just means they should have read the fine print, but in the near past they were more dealing with fires and floods than IEDs.

We aren't isolated from the watchmen on the walls.

Its important to remember that, as part of its push for a war that would be hard to justify to the American people, the Bush administration worked diligently to ensure such isolation occurred. If the press looked too closely, if the people thought through the arguments presented by the Administration too well, the war would not have happened.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, a majority of those in the media signed on as cheerleaders for the war. For example, according to the journalists in Knight Ridder, finding experts within the intelligence community, with direct knowledge of the false claims being made in regards to the aluminium tubes, was not hard to do. All it took was a phone call. The media in general decided not to make that call.

Goldberg's beef is not why is the media failing in its support of the troops, its why have they stopped supporting the lies.

Media frenzies are ignited when American troops are either the perpetrators of acts resulting in victimhood, or are victims themselves. Meanwhile, individual soldiers daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined. This is why the sporadic network and cable news features on heroic soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan comes across as so hokey.

How is this different than press treatment of any group. Look at stories about police, doctors, teachers in difficult schools, social workers etc etc. People in all of these groups are "daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined." The stories reported in the news are almost uniformly about exceptions rather than the rule. This is hardly limited to coverage of the military nor is it really new to news.

Fox’s war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply old-fashioned, antediluvian almost.

That is a truly mind boggling sentiment. By almost any measure Fox is more right-wing than old fashioned.

Fox’s commercial success may be less a factor of its ideological base than of something more primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real national media once again–as opposed to an international one.

Being a shill for particular national policies is not the equivalent of being a real national media.

Worse, we quite often conflate heroism and victimhood...

Spot on.

As to Kaplan's points, well, I personally don't see a problem with the decline of the nation-state, personally. Especially as concerns the western democracies becoming more integrated. I'm personally quite annoyed that I now need a passport to go to freaking CANADA....