{"id":2304,"date":"2010-06-29T09:45:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-29T13:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2304"},"modified":"2010-06-29T09:45:56","modified_gmt":"2010-06-29T13:45:56","slug":"difficult-truths-and-the-long-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/06\/29\/difficult-truths-and-the-long-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Difficult truths and &#8220;The Long War&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Brian referenced <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2010\/06\/25\/AR2010062502160.html\">Andrew Bacevich&#8217;s Washing Post column<\/a> in a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/06\/28\/the-media-gets-it-wrong-again-on-afghanistan\/\">blog post about media coverage of the war in Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I was most interested in a different part of the column, where Bacevich talks about the effect of a professional standing military created after Vietnam:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only  tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke.  Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats  took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended,  was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news  reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian  Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they  found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their  role was simply to cheer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This quote made me think of two things:<\/p>\n<p>First, in my reporting at Fort Drum, I&#8217;m always struck by how separate and isolated members of the military feel from mainstream American life.\u00a0 Person after person tells me the military is an insulated subculture, one the American people rare see and don&#8217;t understand very well.\u00a0 Soldiers and their families do often feel they&#8217;re fighting alone.<\/p>\n<p>Second, we likely wouldn&#8217;t still be in Afghanistan and Iraq if there were a draft, would we?\u00a0 Wouldn&#8217;t Americans demand an endpoint if their children were being conscripted rather than simply being asked to put a magnetic yellow ribbon on the back bumper of the family car?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brian referenced Andrew Bacevich&#8217;s Washing Post column in a recent blog post about media coverage [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}