Is "deuces" an Obama thing?

In Ade A. Sawyer's Nov. 14 column, "Deuces dubya," he labels President George W. Bush as "simply unprepared for his moment in history." Although I understand-not necessarily agree with-his explicit complaints of the Bush administration, I just don't see how any president can arrive in office "prepared" for the acts of terror that the Bush administration handled appropriately.

May I also add that the great "debate" of the operation in Iraq should not be a debate at all. To bring up a rather common topic (especially among the left here at Duke) I am going to mention Darfur. From the moment, I stepped on campus this year, I have had What is the What shoved down my throat, and while I agree it is a sad story, how can we forget all of the Iraqi citizens who were being murdered by the regime of Saddam Hussein before American intervention? So Hussein is dead, and we have helped establish a democracy in Iraq, but it is obvious to anybody concerned with the situation that if we were to withdraw from Iraq now, Iran would reinstate an autocratic regime there comparable to that of Saddam's.

My question is, why fight genocide in Darfur, and spread out even more government money, if you aren't willing to fight the insurgencies in Iraq that, if given the opportunity, will begin the genocide of countless more Iraqi citizens? Do we expect President-elect Barack Obama to take action in Sudan due to his own African heritage, because if that's the case, how much more racist can we be in considering the plight of the Sudanese more important than that of the Iraqi? Iraq is dependent upon America in this age, and to say we shouldn't be there is, in effect, encouraging the genocide of thousands.

I know Sawyer didn't mention anything in his column about either Sudan or Darfur, yet I am just using them as a parallel of a global consciousness (at least a Duke consciousness) that is ignorant to the situation of the struggling Iraqi's. Before you bash the war in Iraq, take into consideration that it is the same prevention of genocide that, as globally aware citizens, we should be trying to combat. We can't leave the situation there only to fight the same battle on a different battleground. Give Iraq hope. It wasn't a mistake. We didn't find weapons of mass destruction, but we ousted a tyrant and are now protecting a people that would otherwise live under oppression and fear of death.

Tim Light

Trinity '12