PROVIDENCE — Welcome to 21st-century United States, where the military goes to war in Iraq and Afghanistan while the citizenry at home shops the mall.

Peel the yellow ribbon stickers off the SUV bumpers and confront a country where the media is too busy showing clever ads and amusing viewers with the exploits of Hollywood celebrities to depict the glory and agony of war in all of its bloody and flawed complexity.

Teach an Ivy League class and ask any of the 100 or so students if they have ever served in the military. Don’t be surprised when not one hand is raised.

Those images, and others, were probed yesterday in a spirited discussion at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies at a symposium about media images of the Iraq war and the growing gap between the American public and the soldiers, families and communities that are touched directly by the grim realities of war.

Among the participants were a diverse group of military officers, filmmakers, bloggers, reporters, academics, authors and experts on military history and the role of women in the combat. Some of the panelists had strong antiwar backgrounds, while others were stellar supporters of the military.

Yet, one theme running through the event was a deep divide between those in the military asked to give everything — their limbs, careers, sanity, family and even their lives — and the citizens at home, who are not called to sacrifice.

Fewer and fewer reporters are in Iraq, said Col. David Lapan of the Marine Corps, turning out fewer stories for the U.S. media. Lapan, an Iraq war veteran and military public affairs officer, recalled that more than 700 reporters were embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq in 2003. By 2005, there were about 20 embedded journalists.

“Right or wrong, there is less coverage now than at the start of operations,” said Lapan.

The public and news media may simply be tired of the Iraq war story line, said Trish Wood, author of What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War.

“I think it is ennui,” said Wood. “Most of the American people are not invested in this war. They won’t be taxed for it and their kids aren’t fighting it.”

Without a military draft, used to marshal troops for World War II and the Vietnam War, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen on the stressed shoulders of National Guard and military troops who hail mostly from working-class backgrounds.

“These kids have spent more time in combat than soldiers at any other time in our history,” said retired Army Col. Greg Gardner. “They are on 15-month tours, some of them have been involved in four, five tours. One thing I fault the [Bush] administration for is the failure to mobilize the country post 9/11.”

At Brown, a famously liberal Ivy campus, it is unusual to find students who have served in the military or who know people who do, said Prof. Matthew Gutmann, who teaches anthropology. When he asked a lecture hall filled with 100 students last month whether any of them had been in the military, “not one hand went up.”

Journalists who are embedded with U.S. troops face the unenviable dilemma of honest reporting about soldiers who control their safety. “When you are protected by the people you cover, it’s problematic,” said Brian Palmer, a former CNN reporter who tired of the lack of context in television news and now makes films.

Palmer showed an 8-minute film clip of a battle in Iraq as an example. Eight minutes is much too long for a piece on the nightly news but is barely long enough to show what happened in a battle with armed insurgents. Depending on how the fight was edited, a short clip of a U.S. soldier firing a bullet into an insurgent who appeared to already be dead could have been aired in a short span to show troops in an unfavorable light.

Another problem, Palmer said, is “gotcha-style” journalism, where an isolated or minor scene in a larger event is hyped into a new story. One such example, Palmer said, was a brief check on a day in the field of a soldier suspected of drug use, which could have been conflated into a story about drug use among U.S. troops but wouldn’t have been an accurate portrayal of the actions of the vast majority of American soldiers under fire in a life-or-death situation.

“It is almost like you are airing dirty laundry if you report 100 percent,” said Palmer. “You have to report essential things in context.”

The unrelenting commercialism of television news and the pressure for short, punchy immediate war images are enemies of strong journalism in Iraq, said several panelists.

“When you are beholden to a Pepsi commercial, you are not going to do good journalism,” said Charles Monroe-Kane, a National Public Radio producer.

Some reporters in mainstream news organizations are “doing exceptional, exceptional work,” in bringing the war home, said Palmer. “But how much room for that is there between the Pepsi commercials?”

Also making television reporting from Iraq difficult, several speakers said, is the clash between immediacy and the culture of “being first” with sensational war footage and the need to verify whether a story is fair or not.

Many important stories from Iraq are not getting told by mainstream news organizations. An example, said Erin Solaro, an expert on female soldiers, is the extent to which the women are serving heroically in combat missions.

Military brass do not want to admit the extent to which women are subject to combat dangers, Solaro said, because it is a political hot-button issue. She said the military should drop all combat restrictions because “the women have earned it.”

Almost 180,000 women have served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Solaro said, but some political and religious conservatives still insist on viewing “women as victims.”

As is the case in the larger American society, some of the stories about Iraq that do not get much attention in the mainstream media are being told by independent filmmakers and on such Internet venues as blogs.

Deborah Scranton, a Brown graduate, is a New Hampshire filmmaker who directed The War Tapes, an Iraq war film shot largely by New Hampshire Guard troops using digital cameras. Scranton was able to show the horrors of war up close and personal while retaining a profound respect for the work of the soldiers.

Other filmmakers and writers have told stories of the war’s impact on the families of the soldiers and the tortuous path to grieving in a military culture that doesn’t like to dwell on death.

Blogs can keep mainstream reporters honest, says Matthew Burden, who blogs at www.Blackfive.net, and tells the stories of soldiers on the frontline in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Too often, said Sgt. Christopher Loverro, an Army veteran of Iraq, the media focuses on the story of the military’s failures in Iraq and does not report on the humanitarian triumphs, such as soldiers soliciting blankets and clothes from Americans to give to Iraqi children.

“The mainstream media is failing this republic,” said Solaro. “Drop the Britney Spears and the rest of the trash and start treating us like intelligent citizens.”

smackay@projo.com