[Ramona_A_Stone]

Originally Posted by Mazer

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.

Your toilet is broken. You call a plumber. Your neighbor asks "what's the plumber doing there?"

If you want to be a smart ass, you might say the plumber is there to get paid, but you would really be avoiding answering your neighbor's question. On the other hand if you answered "he's there to fix the toilet," I doubt your neighbor would accuse you of unfairly projecting your own agenda on his.

If the almighty Buck Stopper has an agenda and he orders people to carry it out it is exactly the same as saying that those people are serving as the embodiment of his agenda. I don't really understand your need to refute this beyond the fact that you seem to be a self-appointed although somewhat flailing apologist for the sainted, perfectly neutral, politically agenda-less military. Or perhaps you're suggesting that there is in fact a hidden ulterior motive--a concept that, I'd concede, isn't beyond the realm of possibility. Perhaps the plumber is using the idea of fixing the toilet as a ruse and is actually there to raid your medicine cabinet?

Originally Posted by Mazer

so military life actually requires the kind of tolerance and open-mindedness that liberals pretend is their hallmark

lol, well now you've convinced me. I'm heading straight down to the local recruitment office to sign up, dressed as Elizabeth Taylor.

Originally Posted by Mazer

Soldiers keep their political opinions private out of necessity.

In a 2003 Gallup Poll, nearly 1/5th of the soldiers surveyed said they felt the situation in Iraq had not been worth going to war over and the number of military families who believe that war was not the right course of action is actually higher than that in the general population. They may have divulged this information privately, but it's no secret.

Originally Posted by Mazer

Blame the free press, not the military.

In July, Rod Nordland, who served as Newsweek’s Baghdad bureau chief for two years, told readers of Foreign Policy this:

FOREIGN POLICY: Are Americans getting an accurate picture of what’s going on in Iraq?

Rod Nordland: It’s a lot worse over here [in Iraq] than is reported. The administration does a great job of managing the news. Just an example: There was a press conference here about [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi’s death, and somebody asked what role [U.S.] Special Forces played in finding Zarqawi. [The official] either denied any role or didn’t answer the question. Somebody pointed out that the president, half an hour earlier, had already acknowledged and thanked the Special Forces for their involvement. They are just not giving very much information here.

FP: The Bush administration often complains that the reporting out of Iraq is too negative, yet you say they are managing the news. What’s the real story?

RN: You can only manage the news to a certain degree. It is certainly hard to hide the fact that in the third year of this war, Iraqis are only getting electricity for about 5 to 10 percent of the day. Living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war. The administration has been successful to the extent that most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made. They keep talking about how the Iraqi army is doing much better and taking over responsibilities, but for the most part that’s not true.

FP: How often do you travel outside of the Green Zone?

RN: The restrictions on [journalists’] movements are very severe. It is extremely dangerous to move around anywhere in Iraq, but we do. We all have Iraqi staff who get around, and we go on trips arranged by the U.S. State Department as frequently as we can.

But the military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story—they use the word slant—what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don’t like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with the work they had done on embed. But we get out among the Iraqi public a whole lot more than almost any American official, certainly more than military officials do.

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