of the American People, but do not want to dispute that. I thought the Marine-lawyer made many good points (not the least of which is that the military is better educated than the general population).

These two points, however, I found very telling:

But if we limit the warrior ideal's physical courage to an isolated subculture of military, police and firefighters, focusing them solely on this virtue, we risk cultivating doers less tolerant of different lifestyles or ways of thinking. And if we limit aesthetic appreciation to the world of academics and economic elites, never encouraging them to roll up their own sleeves, we risk fostering gifted thinkers great on nuance but subject to paralysis by analysis.

Or worse. This artificial separation forces us to confront global terrorism with either the compassionate consensus of the whole-food collective or the indiscriminate anger of the lynch mob -- failures both. "War is an ugly thing," British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote about the American Civil War, "but not the ugliest of things: the decayed . . . feeling which thinks nothing worth war is worse." We must, instead, face terrorism's cult of death with hard steel, informed strategies and a rock-solid code of shared societal behavior to defeat those whose defining feature is the absence of honor.
Instead, we (civilians) were told to go shopping - a failure of leadership vis a vis the civilian population that still continues.

COL Bogdanos' overall theme that there must be better military-civilian communication is preaching to my choir (more than one of my posts have emphasized that).