Letter from America: Compared to the Vietnam War era, there has been little anti-war agitation on the campuses of American universities.
The main reason for that, according to students and teachers to whom I spoke at Washington University, Seattle, where President Mary McAleese gave an address on EU-US relations on Tuesday, is that this time there is no conscription.
Nevertheless, campus dissent is simmering, mainly over the way the army and marines are trying to recruit young people to go to Iraq.
A few hours before Mrs McAleese's arrival, dozens of students demonstrated at the university for an end to military recruitment at schools and colleges.
In the centre of Seattle on the same day, groups of protesters chanting, "Education not war, kick recruiters out the door", blocked the military recruiting offices on 5th Avenue and South Jackson Street.
The demonstrations were concerned with aggressive recruitment methods at schools, especially those in deprived areas which provide the bulk of recruits.
Resentment has been growing over the past year as army recruiters resort to desperate measures to meet their target of 80,000 recruits this year, already 16,500 short.
The US army's chief recruiter, Maj Gen Mike Rochelle admits that this is the most challenging environment since Vietnam. He blames low unemployment and the high casualty rate in Iraq which induces fear of loss of life or a limb. A total of 1,652 soldiers have died there in just over two years, 25 in the last week alone.
"This is the first time the all-volunteer force has been challenged in sustained land combat," he said, and there is now a "very, very low propensity to enlist", both on the part of young Americans and those who influence them, such as parents and teachers.
The protests this week were fuelled by the exposure of recruiting methods at one centre in Golden, Colorado, by an enterprising 17-year-old high school student called David McSwane.
McSwane decided to see how far the army would go to get one more soldier, and posed as a potential recruit while secretly taping his conversations.
He told the recruiter that he was a school drop-out and that he had a drug problem that he couldn't kick. The army requires a high school diploma and doesn't accept recruits who take drugs.
The recruiter told him how to buy a fake high school diploma from a fictitious school on the internet. He suggested the name "Faith Hill Baptist School"
McSwane followed his suggestion, got a forged diploma and exam scores for $200, sent them in to the recruitment office and then had the following conversation with the recruiter.
McSwane: "They accepted my diploma and all that?"
Recruiter: "Yeah, that's what they told us."
McSwane: "All right. So they don't know that it's fake or anything, I'm not going to get in trouble?"
Recruiter: "Right. You won't. No."
McSwane: "All right. Cool!"
Another recruiter then drove the 17-year-old in an army vehicle to buy a product in a drug store to enable him pass the army's drug test. "You just have the follow the instructions to the tee," he is heard saying. "It's got like 150 per cent guarantee that you'll pass. You know, and I've seen it work before."
After this was written up in McSwane's high-school newspaper, there was a national furore. Former military recruiters came forward to say it wasn't an isolated incident, but a widespread epidemic.
Another account surfaced in Houston, Texas, of a recruiter threatening the "federal arrest" of a 20-year-old recruit if he backed out.
Following this, the army shut its 1,700 recruiting offices for a day last Friday to give recruiters new instructions about ethical behaviour.
In the last seven months, there have been almost 500 allegations of recruiters lying to applicants, signing mentally ill recruits or helping recruits hide information that would bar them from serving.
The recruiting mess is a major setback for the military at a time when support for the war has fallen to below 50 per cent. The army has been made less attractive as a career by abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Stories have been appearing in the media of soldiers being charged with killings in combat situations - though acquittals are common.
On Thursday, a sergeant was ruled not guilty by an army jury in Texas of the murder of an unarmed Iraqi he had shot, despite admitting he had lied to make it look like self-defence.
The same day in North Carolina a general dismissed criminal charges against a lieutenant who had unhandcuffed two Iraqi prisoners and ordered them to search their own car before he shot them dead in a fusillade of 50 bullets.
The Iraqi war with its deadly roadside bombs does not produce many stories of heroic combat of the kind that might attract recruits.
The most celebrated army account of heroism, the death in a firefight in Afghanistan of former football star Pat Tillman, turned out to be a lie.
Tillman's father Patrick told the Washington Post last week: "They realised that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."
Tillman was shot by his own side, but this information was deliberately withheld by the Pentagon, which has now apologised.
The growing unpopularity of the war was highlighted at Garfield High School in Seattle earlier this month, where on May 9th the parent-teachers association voted 25-5 for a resolution saying "public schools are not a place for military recruiters".
Garfield is one of Seattle's top schools and is racially diverse, with African-Americans making up a third of its student population. Reports of the meeting revealed that the opposition to military recruitment stemmed in part from resentment that public funds were going to the war rather than into education.
Some parents argued that the military should not be denied the right of free speech but they were in the minority. Others claimed the young people were being recruited to perform illegal acts.
Parent-teacher chairwoman Amy Hagopian said their role was "to look out for the health and welfare of our kids" especially those from poor backgrounds, and "defend those kids from what is often a predatory recruiter".
Under the education act known as No Child Left Behind, all school districts are required to give recruiters access to students, or risk losing federal funding, and the Garfield decision is likely to become a test case.
Students may in any event take matters into their own hands. At Seattle Central Community College, angry protesters forced two recruiters to flee from the campus. The protests may be heating up nation-wide.
This week students will hold a national anti-war conference in New York and Students Against the War National Network is calling for another day of protest on the campuses on Wednesday.