So have you heard about the campus panel about Iraq scheduled for next week? Or heard anyone talking about the U.N. recently? No? Oh, right, I forgot. Iraq is sooooo not hot right now.
If I wasn't in a political science class this semester, I wouldn't have heard a word about Iraq anywhere at Duke, except for the occasional "International" article in the Chronicle. Nobody's talking about it. Last spring, everybody was talking about it. Everybody had an opinion. There were anti-war protests, pro-war rallies, body bags at the bus stop and flags flying high. Then we left for the summer. Now we're back, and Iraq has disappeared as a campus buzz topic.
Did all those people who were so intense and so emotional about the war transfer? Did they all take Mary Adkins' advice and cease verbal communication? Obviously not. So what happened?
Part of it is that neither of the two voices that were being heard loudest on campus about the war--the extreme anti-war "no blood for oil" crowd, and the radically pro-war "we'll invade anyone we damn well please" crowd -- have anything useful to offer right now. Once the major fighting stopped, they couldn't capitalize on people's passions, and everyone realized that their arguments were based more on emotion than on reason.
The warmongers, after bragging about how fast we toppled Saddam, didn't really care what happened to the Iraqis. They were just happy that the U.S. flexed its muscles. Once the problem of Iraq became one of rebuilding a country, putting together some semblance of a government and fighting off a guerilla war, the hawks flew off the ship. Fortunately, Donald Rumsfeld has to care about what happens to Iraq in the post-war phase, since he's Secretary of Defense and all. Otherwise, he might have done the same thing.
The doves fell silent because, well, it's kind of hard to protest a war once you've won it, and the findings of mass graves and torture chambers all over Iraq tend to make any supporter of peace and justice happy that Saddam has been removed. The only idea I've heard the peace police offer up recently is to pack up all the troops, leave the country and pretend the war never happened. That'd be a great idea, wouldn't it? Leave a place with a history of ethnic and religious violence and lots of weapons without any sort of government at all. I don't think so.
Both sides had so much to talk about last spring and have so little to talk about now because they both looked at the problem of Iraq, and the reasons for war, from distorted viewpoints. It's not really their fault, our government did the same thing. President Bush presented the war as an imperative--Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, they were linked to al-Qaeda and we would suffer if we didn't invade. To someone who believed those things, it made perfect sense to invade. To someone who thought that was all a smokescreen for some secret oil deals, it made absolutely no sense to invade. For someone looking at it more objectively, seeing the horrors of Saddam's regime but also worrying about the problems that would arise after the war, it was a difficult decision. Now that the ambiguity and the uncertainty of what needs to be done in Iraq have become clear to everyone, it's not so easy to form a passionate opinion. Unfortunately, too many of us have decided that since it's not easy to think about, we're not going to worry about it.
The war in Iraq was a war of choice, but most people at Duke argued about it in absolutes. The need to rebuild Iraq so that it remains peaceful and democratic is not a choice. We went to war, we invaded the country and now we're running it. If we screw it up, it'll be the worst foreign policy disaster for the United States since Vietnam, and we will have opened ourselves up to many more terrorist attacks both at home and abroad. If we do it right, we'll create the first democratic state in the Middle East besides Israel, and it will have a positive effect on the rest of the region.
It seems like the Bush administration didn't have a great plan for handling the reconstruction, and that's where the silence at Duke about Iraq is a problem. The consequences of the war in Iraq will be with us for many, many years, and Duke students (as everyone always likes to tell us) are tomorrow's leaders. If we don't start thinking and talking about how to handle the aftermath of the war now, or how to handle situations like Iraq that are inevitability going to arise in the future, it's going to come back and haunt us for the rest of our adult lives.
Jonathan Ross is a Trinity sophomore. His column appears every third Wednesday.
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