There was no baiting involved in my response. Most of the U.S. journalistic community has an agenda which is left-of-center, anti-military, and always ready to compromise U.S. national security for a scoop. Dana Priest, for example, opted to grasp for the Pulitzer Prize even at the cost of severely degrading a working and productive U.S. intelligence program. And, obviously, she was rewarded for her anti-U.S. action by the doyens of the journalistic community, which surely must reflect on their attitudes as well. How supportive of the U.S. war effort is that?

The hyprocrisy that sticks most in my throat, however, comes from the crocodile tears so many journalists shed over the astounding number of amputees our armed forces have suffered because of land mines and IEDs. Deaths from both causes could be greatly reduced if the U.S. military simply mined the Pak-Afghan border and the appropriate Iraqi borders to staunch the flow of such devices and other ordnance into each country.

We don't and are troops are killed and maimed because much of the media and other left-of-center groups support the legacy of a long dead, half-wit British princess whose sole substantive success in life was to make the world safe for Anglo-American troops -- including perhaps one of her sons -- to die from mines and IEDs. There seems a certain lack of logic in wailing over amputees and yet opposing the use of weapons that could protect our troops and make the enemy and its supporters suffer in their stead. But not for journalists, I suppose.

Updated at 1:17 p.m.

As to Michael Scheuer’s comment: “The bulk of the U.S. and Western media is anti-military, anti-U.S., and more interested in finding and reporting negative things about our forces than they are in seeing us win the war.” I’m not going to take the bait and waste time defending the journalism community as patriotic—except to say that I don’t know any U.S. journalists truly interested in seeing America lose a war. Most journalists are not contemplatives and are barely conscious of any deep motive for doing what they do. They’re too busy chasing the story of the fleeting moment.

Here’s what I do think needs to be said, based on my own experience, about journalists who devote themselves to covering wars—a fairly distinct lot within the media community.

They’re adrenaline freaks. They find the whole thing exhilarating in some kind of primitive biological way. OK, they don’t get to carry a gun, but they do get to be in and around the battlefield. It’s a high and a somewhat addictive one. The guys who did the Balkans all descended on Tajikistan, the media gateway to Afghanistan, after 9/11. They all smelled war—everyone did—and they were raring to go, with or without their malaria pills. They were away from the home office. They had the worried attention of their editors. They got to gripe, endlessly but legitimately, about the awful food and the sludge coming out of the hotel shower. Nobody cared how much they drank or who they shacked up with. Does life get any better than this?

Of course they distrust authority, including military authority. I know this seems like an obvious point but it needs to be made. Distrust of authority is innate to the good journalist and distrust should not be equated with a desire to see authority “lose.” This is simply the default impulse of a good journalist. Show me a scribe whose mindset dovetails with authority and I’ll show you a lousy journalist.

All of this said, Michael Scheuer might be right in his call for ending the embedding practice. I say might be because I haven’t done it and my feelings are mixed. I do think this is an important question and I’d be interested to hear from others on this.

Leave the system alone except for stopping the practice of embedding reporters with U.S. combat units.

The bulk of the U.S. and Western media is anti-military, anti-U.S., and more interested in finding and reporting negative things about our forces than they are in seeing us win the war. More than a few of the rest are simply pro-Pentagon shills who specialize in taking small, one-off, and transitory local successes in Iraq or Afghanistan and extrapolating them into countrywide triumphs. How many times have we read front-page stories in the Washington Post or NY Times about a small success in Konar, Helmand, Kandahar, or some other Afghan province that is hailed as the miracle cure for the war, and then a few weeks later learn that the Taleban have returned to control the area? The media, on the whole, is negative force that makes winning wars much more difficult.

That said, it is better to cope with that reality and let the pests do as they please and avoid any sort of censorship. But stop the process of embedding. If the big, brave journalists really want to be on the battlefield let them go and look around until they are either content or dead. And this goes for all journalists, perhaps especially those who make a career out of cheerleading for the Pentagon by, for example, finding no fault with rules of engagement that make our troops targets rather than killers. Let all of them pay their own way, pay for their own protection, and risk their own lives.

It would be a step in the right direction to remove any obligation U.S. soldiers and Marines now have to risk their lives to protect people who are likely to make winning the war more difficult by writing negative or evidence-free positive stories, or by disclosing classified information.

Speaking as a journalist, what I’d most like to say is kudos to Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone. This is easily the most revealing piece written about the political-military management of the Afghanistan war and ought to be a shoo-in for a national magazine award. And shame on the beat “journalists” who, I suppose red-faced with envy, are dumping all over his scoop. I have in mind, in particular, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, Logan took one gratuitous pot shot after another at Hastings, saying she simply doesn’t believe there were no ground rules for his interviews with General Stanley McChrystal and staff. And how does she know that? “I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that,” she said. In other words, she really doesn’t know anything at all about the arrangements Hastings made to get his job done—she is simply extrapolating from her own personal experience. In such circumstances, when a journalist has clearly outdone his peers, the peers ought to have the good grace to acknowledge that they got whupped. (Nor does Tom Ricks really need to offer pointers to the military on how to manage the press, as he did on his blog. His pointers are all in the category of “duh,” as in, “establish ground rules,” but even so, that’s not his job to be the advice giver.) As for any wider lessons from this episode, I’ve never done the embed thing with the U.S. military, but I did once have the rather awkward experience of being escorted around by the Russian military on a trip to Chechnya. It was awkward and somewhat comical because the whole thing was obviously a propaganda exercise on the part of the Russian government—whose officials kept insisting the situation was under control even as explosions could be heard in the not-so-far distance. When a bunch of us jumped out of the bus to try to interview some old ladies standing around in a parking lot outside of Grozny, our ‘minder’ soldier scampered after us and pointed his rifle back at the bus. Yes, I know, this was the Russian military, but still, I can’t shake the feeling that the embed arrangement tends to work out better for the government than for the press.

One other lesson: Editors ought to keep a trained eye on their beat journalists and ask themselves whether their scribe is getting too cozy with sources—and not hesitate to change beat assignments whenever that happens. Term limits for beat journalists? You bet.

I am in full agreement with those who argue that the current system is fundamentally sound. Nothing gets the media more riled up than refusing to provide it with information. Reporters, when denied access to authoritative sources, still have to file their stories. They do so by relying on second- or third-hand information, documentary materials that invariably are in draft form, and rumor, gossip and innuendo. That is not to say that these less-than-genuine sources will not find their way into the public domain, if only via blogs. It is to say, however, that providing reporters with first-hand access to officers andf troops reduces the likelihood that bad or misleading information will be treated as genuine.

I have dealt with reporters for over three decades. The vast majority are dedicated, patriotic professionals. If fed junk, and if they also have access to genuine material, they will invariably discard the junk. They will only use questionable materials when they have nothing else to work with, and when they have not had the access to those who could authoritatively challenge the validity of those materials.

I have no idea why General McChrystal and his staff deigned to give an interview to Rolling Stone. With all due respect to that journal, it is not the in the same league as the New Republic, the American Spectator, the Weekly Standard, or, for that matter, the National Journal. And it is certainly not the New York Times or Washington Post.

To change the current state of play between the media and the military over an ill-advised Rolling Stone interview would do a disservice to both parties, and indeed to the American public. Embedding reporters during, and indeed prior to, the Iraq War was one of Don Rumsfeld's truly briliant innovations. It should be retained by his future successors, as it has been until now by his immediate successor, Bob Gates.

I don’t see where anything should change unless the journalist broke rules of ethics. And I have not heard anyone claim he did. As long as everybody understands the rules, plays by them and recognizes that the media and the military each have a job to do, there is no real problem. Things work best when each side does its own job to the best of its ability. When that happens both democracy and the common defense are well served.

The press’ performance in Iraq and Afghanistan has been appalling. They have continually failed to meet their responsibilities to American democracy. There are three paramount functions that it is supposed to serve: to inform accurately, completely and fairly; to observe critically the conduct of our government and to bring forth any dubious activities; and to sustain a public dialogue on policies of consequence. The media generally have fallen far short of this standard.

The bill of indictment is a comprehensive one. For years the press served as propagandist and cheerleader for everything that the Bush administration did. Even the august New York Times’ played this role – most notably in acting as a vehicle for transmitting the skein of lies that paved the way for the Iraq adventure (remember Linda Miller & Michael Gordon on WMDs).. Let us recall as well its decision to bury the story of illegal surveillance and wiretaps of Americans at home for a year because, as its Executive Director feebly said, the paper’s policy is not to display details of legal matters. This is the rational of a kept press in an autocracy.

Second, passive acceptance of embedding on the Pentagon’s terms has rendered most journalists loyal domestics most of the time. Ninety percent of the reporting from Baghdad (75% from Kabul) has been little more than a cut-and-paste collage of official communiques laced with the occasional calculated leak. It could have been done in New York or Washington just as well at less sweat. Reporters were unable even to communicate with the locals in their native language. Why didn’t someone at the NYT think of telephoning Yousef Ibrahim (remember him?), who is still active in the Gulf, instead of relying on a bunch of novices? It wasn’t until three years into the Iraqi occupation that someone came up with the breakthrough idea of using Iraqi (Afghani) journalists as partners. As a consequence, the gross distortions embedded in official explanations of what was happening were not subject to critical analysis or challenge.

Three, this state of affairs helps us to understand the paucity of reporting about Iraqi politics. Insightful reports on the behind the scenes politicking among Iraqi factions was a rare find. This despite the fact that Iraqi politicians at the other end of the Green Zone could be reached easily safely by golf cart or skate board. Our ace journalists missed everything: inter alia, the split between Sunni tribes and the violent Sunni fundamentalist groups; Washington’s massive support for Aliya Alawi (three times); Chalabi’s self-exposure as an accomplice of Tehran (even when he was feeding the Bushies Iran-serving and self-serving tall tales); anything having to do with the Sadrists – most significant being how the Iranians forced al-Sadr to cease and desist at the time of the combat with Maliki/Petraeus in early 2008; how Maliki outsmarted us on the SOFA agreement; the impact of Baghdad’s Sunni/Shi’ite civil war on the constellation of political forces in Iraq.

This failure explains the resilience of the great ‘Surge’ myth that deserves a Pulitzer Prize in the Fiction category. Embedded journalists are compromised journalists – as we understand what ‘embedded’ means nowadays. If David Halberstam and his colleagues had been similarly ‘embedded,’ the country would have swallowed whole the fictional tale of success in Vietnam. Most recently, it was embedded journalists, including the Washington Post’s star reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who for a whole month told us of Marhaj as a city of 80,000 when in truth it is a dusty crossroads village. Hastings of Rolling Stone is on the mark when he says that if he wanted to be a Pentagon publicist, he would have studied advertising instead of journalism.

Specifically, how well has the press served the public interest in its explication of the Obama administration’s judgments and choices on Afghanistan? Here are a few basic questions that deserve clarification. (1) Who is the enemy? In December, Obama said it was al-Qaeda; in June it was the Taliban. Are they identical? What distinction is made between Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban? If the core of the movement is now across the border, how can our forces in South and East Afghanistan achieve a conclusive ‘victory’? (2) Yet, if we move into Pakistan, what dire consequences await us? What are the chances of the Pakistani government giving us permission to take over the Northwest quadrant of their country? What is likely reaction were we to do so without its permission? (3) Obama has said that this is a war we must win? How is that high stake reconciled with a commitment to begin withdrawing forces a year from now? (4) What is the definition of ‘success”? Why have we still not gotten an answer from the White House or Obama’s minions? (5) The McChrystal affair has exposed the unhappy reality that each of the President’s senior officials is flying solo. What does Obama plan to do about this?

Has the press demanded answers? I’m not aware of any serious effort to do so. Have we gotten answers from the White House? I’m not aware of any except the mumbo-jumble on Sunday morning talk shows that passes intellectual muster only by the press participants’ kindergarten standards.

Is this judgment too harsh? I suggest a mind experiment. Let’s fast forward to next year’s Super Bowl. Let’s imagine sports coverage of the superficiality and credulousness that has marked the press’ treatment of our overlapping interventions in the Greater Middle East. Imaginable? How long would any paper/network offering that sort of vapid coverage stay in business? The prosecution rests.

There are no straightforward fixes for this situation. After all, it is just one expression of the sharp deterioration in American public life generally. Honesty, integrity and fairness are the lifeblood of democracy. Never universal in any country, they have become so scarce as to threaten the coherence and accountability of our political life. Virtual journalism is one of its symptoms.

McChrystal and his playmates should have been more careful. They were not, and he has paid the price for that. Some of the playmates will probably pay a similar price. "Fooling around" with the press, especially the essentially hostile left wing press, has always been a dangerous game, only to be indulged in by the deft. Ground rules have to be carefully worked out, and performance within those ground rules must be checked for performance more or less continously. Even then, the process is a gamble.

This is always a love/hate relationship. On the one hand the general typically seeks to use the press for his own purposes whether that is personal self-promotion or an imagined opportunity to influence a target audience. On the other hand, the reporter is clearly a danger,

"Cump" Sherman threatened to hang those reporters who "interfered" with him and his intentions. Stonewall Jackson played the Richmond papers skilfully in struggles with his opponents within the Confederate government. Judah Benjamin, the Secretary of War, learned that lesson the hard way. It has been thus since there have been journalists existing in the same world with generals. From this relationship between military power in the hands of the generals, and information power in the hands of the media emerges the knowledge that the public needs in order to have an opinion of what is done in their name. Nevertheless, the game must be played with skill on both sides, The only skill displayed in this case was that of Hastings, the enterprising "mole."

I think that the concept of embedding reporters with combat units is a good one. Journalists with this kind of experience develop an understanding of the nature of operations that comes from nothing else. They also come to feel the pain and the warmth in these units. This is prejudicial to objectivity? Fine. Station other, different, reporters at senior headquarters where they can soak up the information fed to them there.

The old saw about the public needing to know is profoundly true, but generals need to understand that journalists are just as much sharks as they are.

Like the Patton slapping incident, this episode falls under Holmes's warning that great cases make bad law. Exposure of what passed for military maturity among Gen. McChrystal and his staffers reflected at best their carelessness, at worst their utter obtuseness. Neither is grounds for any universal conclusion about military-press relations.

I used to teach media-military relations at Georgetown University, and published a well-received book on the subject in 1991 (Defense Beat, Macmillan:1991). You would be hard-pressed to find two professions that are more different than journalism and warfighting. Warfighers value regimentation and secrecy, whereas reporters favor freedom and full disclosure. The divergence of values mirrors their different roles, but what it means in practice is that there is huge potential for trouble in the relationship even when both sides are exhibiting high professional standards.

In the case of the Rolling Stone piece, we have good reason to suspect that neither side was operating at the top of their game. The comments of General McChrystal and his staff were disrespectful and childish. And the reporter must have known he was disclosing comments that the soldiers did not expect to see in print. The fact that the reporter had some up-front agreement on what could and couldn't be included in the story that was observed in subsequent interactions doesn't change the fact that he knew he was disclosing material his subjects did not wish to see in print. I think there was a violation of trust that will make reporting the war harder for everyone who follows.

I suspect many people had the same two-part response I did when they read the piece. Sort of like the four stage of grief. My first response was, "I can't believe they said those things!" My second response was, "Isn't this the way soldiers at war talk all the time?" So the issue here wasn't really what was said, but the indiscretion that led to it appearing in public media. Soldiers will now be hyper-conscious about how they phrase remarks to journalists, and limit access whenever there is a danger of negative reportage.

Having said all that, let's be honest about the real reason General McChrystal is gone. His strategy is controversial, and evidence of success is mixed. If the strategy were a smashing success, the White House would have continued to put up with McChrystal and his staff. What did in McChrystal was the combination of borderline insubordination with ambigous operational results. You will note that there is nothing negative in the Rolling Stone piece about either Secretary Gates or Secretary Clinton, so McChrystal's people didn't issue a sweeping denunciation of the whole Obama team. It was more in the way of a mixed review. But coming from warfighters whose own performance was mixed, it was enough to end General McChrystal's military career.

I could not agree more with Steven Metz that the McChrystal debacle should not be viewed as a reason to question the overall imbed relationship between the media and the military, nor other aspects of closer involvement.

If there are quarters who wish to review the imbed program and other aspects of enhanced (and largely improved) relations between the two, that issue should be considered separate from the the McChrystal affair. McChrystal and his staff appear to have behaved irresponsibly. That they did so in the presence of a reporter from the more hard-hitting Rolling Stone Magazine may have made matters worse. But I doubt very much that other publications in a similar position would not have reported at least some of the comments attributed to McChrystal and his staff, which simply represented a major story.

The policy of enhanced access to the military on the part of the media has now been in place for some years, and other senior commanders (notably Gen. Petraeus) have not only avoided similar problems, but often have been able to use their close relations with the media to showcase US policy as well as the achievements of their commands.

Media-military relations have vastly improved in recent years, in part because of the imbed program and in part because the media always reflects its audience and the audience has become passionately pro-military since September 11. But now this is seriously challenged.

The danger is that the military will recoil from the McChrystal fiasco and, as much as possible, isolate itself from the media. It's important to remember that one bad incident does not demonstrate that the system is flawed. For every Michael Hastings practicing "gotcha" journalism, there are dozens of writers producing balanced, accurate and usefully critical stories.

Put differently, the problem is not with military-media relations writ large, but with the failure of General McChrystal's staff to understand Hastings' intention, and with the command climate he fostered which was inappropriate for a highly politicized undertaking like counterinsurgency in an era of transparency.