29 August San Antonio Express-News commentary - Insulated from Chaos, Americans are Uneducated About War by Jonathan Gurwitz.

... Israel fought a war in Lebanon for 34 days, and this man doesn't know anyone who didn't serve. The United States has fought one war for nearly five years and another for more than three years. And beyond some select communities, you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who know anyone who has served in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Israel's situation is, of course, unique. As an exceedingly small country in a very dangerous neighborhood, the threats it faces are frequently existential. Universal conscription is as much a matter of defense necessity as it is national ethos. Men serve for three years, women for two. And men like Hazan can be called up until they are 50, women until they are 24.

The decision to respond to Hezbollah's attack and go to war was one that Israelis knew would be felt in every Israeli home. Yet as the fighting ensued, polls showed public support for the war against Hezbollah consistently exceeded 90 percent...

Two decades before the cataclysm of the American Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a philosophical discourse on the role of war and peace in human development.

"War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it."

Unlike the Civil War, unlike Israeli wars, the war on terror does not shake the whole of American society. It shocks on occasion. It shoves its way into the national consciousness when some round number of casualties is reached. But in a nation of nearly 300 million people, the physical, financial and mortal burden of the current conflict is being borne by an exceedingly small number of American families.

There have been many foreign and domestic failures over the past five years. But a brief examination of Israeli society suggests the greatest failure has been the utter inability of our political leadership to convey the sense that we are engaged as a society in a real conflict of historical significance, one that demands sacrifice from more than only the volunteers of its armed forces.