[Mazer]

Originally Posted by Ramona_A_Stone

Of course the military has a political agenda, it's the embodiment of a political agenda. The current agenda is to win the "war on terror," "spread democracy" and make Americans "feel safer" by fighting in Iraq.

You're projecting the president's agenda onto the people who have to do what he orders them to. The buck stops with Bush, Ramona.

You maintain that it's the duty of soldiers to keep their mouths shut about their own political opinions lest recruitment should suffer, but it's apparently lost on you that that in itself is a political agenda, and you go on to argue that the military has ascended to a state of neutrality!

Who said it was their duty? Soldiers keep their political opinions private out of necessity. Almost nobody in the military gets to pick who their superior officers will be. Those who can't take orders from people they disagree with don't last very long, so military life actually requires the kind of tolerance and open-mindedness that liberals pretend is their hallmark. Reticence is not about duty, it's about teamwork, without which there is no military.

Of course the military isn't neutral, the aggressive sterilization of individual opinion itself is a hard political line

Well it would be if it wasn't voluntary. That people from all walks of life sign up for this kind of treatment on purpose, even educated people with college degrees, speaks to the fact that individuality is less important to some people than it is to you. Hey, different strokes for different folks, right?

Also you suggest that Iraq is blanketed by free agent reportage in a journalistic orgy that must be filling virtual warehouses with videotape as evidence that there's no chance the violence is underreported, and yet oddly you could compile all the footage and reports that have emerged from Iraq and been shown to the American public since the outset, edit it together and probably view it in a single evening. Seems to be a small margin of discrepancy there, no?

Blame the free press, not the military. Maybe Iraq war news is a ratings killer and people just don't give a damn anymore. I'm sure there are people you can call to request more Iraq war news coverage, but they've got their advertisers to think about. And there's always print news. I doubt you could read all the printed Iraq war news in a month, let alone an evening.