University President Dave Frohnmayer has made it clear that he did not think it was the University’s place to take a stance against war in Iraq — correctly pointing out, after all, that the University community is not in agreement about the war. At the Jan. 31 University Assembly meeting, some of the faculty members concurred with Frohnmayer and said that whether to take a stance was a matter for individuals to decide, individually.
Seriously, would we prefer the cold eye of history to judge this community of educators by its adherence to protocol, or by its stance against the annihilation of an already annihilated people?
The previous Gulf War was the first all-out war the United States had engaged in since the Vietnam War ended some 17 years earlier. I remember how skittish the American people were about going into Iraq in 1991 — the memory of Vietnam, with its 58,000 American soldiers dead, still burning in our collective memory. George Bush, the elder, was well aware of this, too, so he delayed sending in American ground troops until air attacks could demolish Iraq’s military infrastructure.
The United States dropped thousands of bombs a day, for weeks on end, from an altitude of 30,000 feet, in that “remote-control” war. I can clearly recall our military leaders bragging about the accuracy of our “smart bombs” being somewhere in the range of 80 percent.
But, I wondered, if 80 percent of the thousands of bombs dropped daily hit their targets, where did the other 20 percent land? Some estimates place the death toll of that war in excess of 100,000 Iraqis. If I’m not mistaken, most of those killed were not soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. Errant bombs do not discriminate. They kill anyone unlucky enough to be in their paths. They kill grocers, mechanics, housewives, soccer players and yes, even college students, professors and administrators.
We must take a stance against war not because we doubt that Hussein is a threat, but because we know that the vast majority of those who will be forever scarred by war are not. The last time we went to war with Hussein, we killed perhaps a quarter million Iraqis — and none of them were Hussein. Isn’t there a certain madness in that?
We should take a stance against war at every opportunity, just as a matter of principle. If an institution of higher learning teaches us nothing else, it should be that rarely is killing more innocent people the path to a lasting peace. War breeds more war. For every innocent person you kill, you create several new enemies.
Not taking a stance does not prove objectivity or neutrality. Not taking a stance implies support for the status quo — even if that status quo happens to be pushing for war. Not taking a stance is tantamount to saying that we, as a community of educated people, support the mass killing of thousands of innocent people — with the understanding that this genocide, somehow, is a path to peace.
And how can a community of educators, whose mission statement declares it to be striving to educate through “a commitment to international awareness and understanding” and “by welcoming and guiding change rather than reacting to it,” take a neutral stance?