Responding to "Revisiting Vietnam"

Monique Dols, in today's Spectator, decides it is high time another leftist attacked the vast military-industrial complex. Casting the students of the late 1960s as heroes, and the soldiers of the US military as the brainless drones, she bemoans the current movement to return ROTC to campus. Now, I can follow her to a certain extent. The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq are easily understandable. But beyond that she begins to frustrate and lose me.

Whenever someone in the military complains about discrimination (a fair argument on this campus), s/he is in fact involved in a "series of defamatory fabrications that serve to misrepresent and discredit the antiwar movement on campus." No chance that both sides have bad eggs? no? no? hmm.

At some points she is just being unfair, as in this statement: "On one side are the Columbia Military Society and the Columbia College Conservative Club, supporters of the war in Iraq who want to bring the Reserve Officer Training Corps back onto campus," which links support of ROTC with support of the war. I for one do not support the war, and I think the recent Hamas victory in the Palestinian region is to some degree derived from anger at American actions.

She flat-out lies occasionally, as in saying that ROTC advocates (led in large part by Sean Wilkes of this site) are "discouraged by the lack of widespread support for the return of the program." According to a recent student referendum, a majority of students have no problem with ROTC returning to campus. Chew on that.

In the end, she mouths more of the traditional leftist dogma (which of course has its merits, but is not the focus of this post), and implicitly suggests, in her statement, "It is our generation’s responsibility to work diligently to protect the gains of that era, keep ROTC off campus, and expose the ugly underbelly of US aggression in the world." In her us v. them mentality, the military has become a foe that must be slain. And here we come to the crux of the differences between a liberal like me and a leftist like her. I've studied international politics and history and actually understand the realities of the situation. We need a military. We wouldnt be the country we are today without a military. Our military and economic power have gone hand in hand.

While all that may be changing (I recently wrote a seminar paper on why economic power is surpassing military power in importance), we still need a strong military. Her attacks, broad blows at the entire establishment, would be much more effective if they weren't broadly dogmatic and unrealistic.