Vietnam Era Is SO Over

Bill Kristol went to Iraq recently and wrote this generally uplifting opinion piece upon his return..

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It's true that Iraq is an unpopular war. But hostility to President George W. Bush, or to the war, hasn't spilled over onto the military. A few weeks ago, the Washington Post Magazine featured an article on the military and its relationship with the broader society. The cover line was alarmist--"Us and Them: As mistrust, resentment and misunderstanding grow between the civilian and military communities, can America wage a just and effective war?" But when you read the piece, the only place you find mistrust, resentment and misunderstanding is among some liberal élites. In fact, in most civilian communities there appears to be pretty unambiguous admiration for the military.

While in Iraq, I kept thinking back to a story that Dean Barnett reported in a recent article on the "9/11 generation" in the Weekly Standard. Barnett attended the commissioning of a Marine Corps lieutenant who had just graduated from Harvard. After the ceremony, the young man returned to his dorm room in full dress uniform and received a spontaneous round of applause from classmates. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. The young man's father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

Out of a World War II--era movie, to be precise. Whatever the other ways in which one can try to compare Iraq to Vietnam, in this important respect, here at home, the Vietnam era is over. The post-9/11 era is well under way.