Amid all of this emotionally charged rhetoric of name-calling and war waging, the human capacity for reason seems to have vanished. Frankly, there hasn't been an original idea about Iraq in the popular consciousness since the George W. Bush administration first laid out its policy and the Democrats their rebuttal. Now, months later, the op-ed page of The Chronicle is a genuine farce, with columnists only interested in the blind recantation of side A or side B, and never any effort to scrutinize the basic arguments of either. It is suddenly appropriate just to parrot the ideas of others under the assumption that they are correct. We should be smarter than that.
However, it seems that unilateral policy breeds unilateral thinking. The shallow "with us or against us" doctrine of our government is quickly changing America into a land leery of intelligent dissent. People who question the purpose of attacking Iraq are silenced with the unfair retaliation of the same patented arguments of the Bush administration. And while Bush's points are easily dispelled in a sane environment, the incessant fear-mongering of our friends and enemies drowns out any kind of stand against them. For example, Bush supporters will cite that Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Aniin once met with Mohamed Atta, a supposed Sept. 11 conspirator. But simply knowing this does not prove whether the diplomat acted alone, within a ring of conspirators, or on behalf of Saddam. There should not be a reasonable doubt before we wreak havoc on a country.
Each of us should seriously ask where our world is headed. I only wish that the American citizen would think outside of himself for a change. How would he feel if a foreign government first vaporized his family and then demanded his support? How many of the arguments against Iraq have no valid backing? How the unilateral drive for war will someday turn against him?
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