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Classroom on the Quad
Welcome and Introductions
Bruce Knauft, Faculty Council

Jim Grimsley, Faculty Council

Purvi Patel, College Council

Donna Wong, Campus Life

Iraq: The Challenge of Responsibility
Rick Doner, Political Science

Weapons of Mass Destruction and U.S. Foreign Policy
Dan Reiter, Political Science

A Call to Words
Asanka Pathiraja, Foreign Policy Exchange

Hearing in Eqanimity: Deciding Your Path
Bobbi Patterson, Religion

The Necessity of War with Iraq
Bob Bartlett, Political Science

The Humanitarian Cost of War
Laurie Patton, Religion

A Man of Honor: The President's Noble Vision
Daniel Hauck, College Republicans

Women: War and Peace
Lili Baxter, Women's Studies

The Morality of War
James Tarter, Students for War Against Terrorism

Speak Up or Get Out
Erin Harte, Young Democrats

War Does Not Resolve Conflict, War Is Conflict
Mark Goodale, Anthropology

A War of Liberation
Frank Lechner, Sociology

A Call to Consciousness, A Litany of Questions
Juana Clem McGhee, Institute for Comparative and International Studies

Student Activism: Ways to Be Involved
Erik Fyfe and Rachael Spiewak, Emory Peace Coalition

Cross-Cultural Communication: U.S. and Iraq
Devin Stewart, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies

The U.S. Has Never Been Alone in the World
William Chace, University President

Since each of us holds a piece of the truth (and no one holds all), I value this forum in which we can speak from multiple perspectives with interest and regard—together building new possibilities for community. It is the best way to bring our campus together at this time, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

My topic is "Women: War and Peace," and I'm using "woman" here in a relational context: as someone's mother, sister, lover,co-worker, teacher,wife, friend. I'm speaking about relationship and the web of live that is broken by war. And the need for us to tell a new story about human life and possibility, a story about the human family—a story of peace, nonviolence and beloved community.

Besides teaching women's studies here, I'm also the national chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest interfaith peace and justice organization in the U.S. I'm committed to a life of activism for two reasons:

First, because I've seen the devastation of war first-hand: my parents are holocaust survivors who lost their closest kin to war, including a three-year-old son who walked with his grandmother and two little cousins into the efficient gas ovens of Auschwitz. I never knew him— I was born after the war in a displaced person's camp in Sweden.

The second reason I'm an activist is because in the company of people of goodwill and vision, we are building up a new world, and I invite you to join us.

The war on Iraq, while begun to fight terrorism, has become an exaltation of U.S. technologies of efficiency in slaughter. And the beginnings of this new century sit on the old.

Civilians, mostly women and children, have become the majority of victims of the past century's wars. Civilian casualties climbed from 15 percent in World War I, to 65 percent in World War II, to 75 percent in the wars of the 1990s. What will the percentages be this time?

A recent study of Bosnian refugees showed that a quarter were so traumatized that they could not work or take care of their families.
Soldiers, too, develop terrible psychiatric problems, often resulting in increased levels of domestic violence—like the four soldiers of the special operations units at Ft. Bragg who, within a span of six weeks, killed their wives after returning from Afghanistan.

And let us not forget that the greatest American terrorist of all time, Timothy Mc Veigh, was a veteran of the first gulf war. Filled with rage at the government, and trained in the production of explosive devices, McVeigh killed 168 innocent Americans in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Let me share with you some of the ways that women will pay for a war in Iraq.

For U.S. women:
• War breaks up families and communities. We are sending off those we most cherish, who brighten our days.

• War glorifies militarism and violence. The drumbeat of war drowns out the voices of women and others calling for nonviolent alternatives to war.

• War robs money from programs that benefit women and children. While the u.s. will spend $6-9 billion dollars a month on this war, the federal budget proclaims more cutbacks in healthcare, education, welfare, and childcare.

For Iraqi women:
• More than 10 percent of Iraqi women are widows, already now living in dismal poverty and want.

• Women and girls make up 80 percent of today's refugees and are likely to face sexual violence, malnutrition, psychological problems, and homelessness once the war is over.

• Women are more vulnerable to land mine injuries, since women risk their lives in search of water, food, and fuel for their families.

Most important, women are under-represented in Congress, at the U.N., and around the world in councils that decide on war and peace.

Yes, saddam hussein is a ruthless dictator. But is there no better way to remove him from power then through the killing and traumatizing of innocent civilians and servicemen-and-women and their families back home? There must be a better way.

In his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King, jr. described the "world house" we all live in:
"A great 'world house' in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family . . . who must learn somehow to live with each other in peace."

King challenged us to make "the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence . . . a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict . . . [including] . . . the relations between nations." This, I believe, is the true legacy of our new century.

In Afghanistan they tell a story of rainbows and freedom, and that any girl who walks under a rainbow becomes a boy and any boy becomes a girl. Perhaps if we switched sides, we would be better able to understand each other, and like the rainbow proclaiming a new morning after the rains, peace would finally brighten our earth.