Following up on the post below, let me add a point about one necessary precondition for the boomers' warrior dreams, the all-volunteer army.

Joining the new military crusade has provided boomer hawks and powerful Washingtonians with a wonderful opportunity for moral thrills and adventure travel, but I am guessing their enthusiasm would be significantly tempered if there was any realistic chance of their own luxury tots (as Karen used to call them during our East Coast period) being forced to endanger themselves or slaughter others. The punditocracy/policy intelligentsia world is a thoroughly urbane one, full of people who who personally shun violence and weapons and want their children to run their own think-tanks and journals of opinion rather than M-1 tanks and automatic rifles. (Personally I was extremely disappointed not to see William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg and other brave right-wing warriors getting themselves embedded with some platoon full of Alabama boys. It would have been Dukakis in the tank all over again.) In a perverse fashion, and against all conservative expectations, the East Coast/Ivy League/non-Middle American demographic tilt of the media/policy establishment actually works to damp down resistance to conservative military aggression, by ensuring that potential cheerleaders of war have few personal connections to the people doing the dirty work. 

Of course, the draft didn't restrain the cold warriors who brought us Vietnam, but even then they managed to devise a system (educational deferments) that exempted most of their children. And I have to believe it is significant that the Bush administration and the Republicans have yet to speak of, or ask the American public for, any sort of sacrifice in the name of World War IV. Not even a moderate financial burden, much less a new draft or mass mobilization. The current warmongers are well aware of how shallow the support really is out there and how necessary it is to keep their war or wars on a vicarious level for most people. That is why this president is unlikely to ever take on a truly formidable military target, like North Korea, no matter how well such a war might fit his doctrine. It is also why the architects of the current conflict relied on largely fake but clearly limited justifications like WMDs and the supposed Saddam-Qaeda link, rather than the extensive smash-all-Arab-states, Americanize-the-oil-patch agenda they have been discussing in Washington policy circles for years.