President Obama has called upon colleges to reinstate ROTC now that the Left’s pet military cause of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been realized. For my part, I think colleges should refuse to reinstate ROTC until Gen. George Casey resigns as chief of staff of the Army. He rose to his current position by flopping in Iraq, calling for reductions in troop levels, resisting the surge, and being kicked upstairs by President Bush. In that capacity he utterly disgraced himself and the uniform he wears when he said of the Fort Hood shootings, “And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Thus he openly stated that the lives of the soldiers under his command are worth less than the contrived abstraction called “diversity,” which is meaningful to no one save those who use it to gain unearned benefits. Such a man is not fit to command soldiers. Parents who send their offspring to the American campus should not have to worry that they will be recruited into an army that would rather see them dead than to seem politically incorrect. This also goes for the brass kissers who let all the signs of Major Hasan’s Islamist depradations go unheeded.

The great General Patton was suspended from active duty for slapping a single soldier. The enemy could not believe that the United States government would do such a thing in the middle of an enormous all-out war, and yet they did, to show respect for every individual recruit. And Patton would never have said that some belligerently politicized concept of group equality was more important than the lives of his men.

Furthermore, General Casey has not taken back his statement, and indeed followed it up with even more egregious utterances, to the effect that he would be on the lookout for any signs of “backlash” against Muslims in the Army.

I think the American people would be greatly heartened to see Casey go. The story of his remarks at Reuters is followed by a long thread of denunciations from readers.

Of course we know that most colleges probably agree with Casey that it is better for soldiers to die than to lose “diversity,” but conservatives need not give assent to that view.