Incomplete war debate
Conspicuously absent from both the agenda for Tuesday night’s teach-in titled “Is War Necessary?” and from the subsequent Emerald coverage thereof is a discussion of the effects of a weapon of mass destruction on a large population center, and of the further consequences for the local, national and global economies of the use of such a weapon.
A discussion of whether war with Iraq is necessary seems highly incomplete without thorough consideration of this crucial aspect, for it is the fear of Saddam Hussein developing a nuclear weapon, and the prospect of his using his existing chemical and biological weapons that is the core of the case for going to war.
To ask the question, “Is war with Iraq necessary?”, then ignore this issue and finally conclude war isn’t necessary seems like backwards reasoning: Start with the conclusion you want, and then select the facts you’ll look at.

Brian Stubbs

graduate teaching fellow

physics

Economic injustice prompted a ‘panic’
The United States faces a moral crisis created by the gap in living standards between the industrialized North and the global South. I think that at some level of their consciousness, people in the North are aware that their relative economic privilege is completely unjust. They face a moral crisis similar to that of the southern United States at the time of the Civil War.
Slave owners in the southern states lived in fear that their slaves might rise up and slaughter them. They could not consider abolishing slavery, because their privilege outweighed their fear. Some sort of disturbance might cause whites in part or all of the southern states to fly into what Kenneth M. Stampp, in his book, “The Peculiar Institution,” calls an “insurrection panic.”
I think that what we saw in the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, was an insurrection panic. People in the United States saw the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as the Global South, racialized as people of color, rising up against them. Personally, I did not see the Sept. 11 attacks as a threat to myself — I guess I’m one of the slaves.

Milton Takei

Class of ’92