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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

The New York Times reported yesterday that within less than forty-eight hours of fighting, at least five hundred Iraqi soldiers had been killed by American and British forces in and around the southern city of Basra alone. These five hundred men, nameless and faceless to us, were nevertheless not nameless and faceless. They were fathers to children, husbands to wives, sons and brothers. They were men who, had an invasion not been unleashed less than a week ago, would have gone on to marry their lovers, watch their children take their first steps, read books, talk politics, pray to Allah, and, this same God willing, pass on many years from now leaving a lifetime of memories with those who remain. But for these five hundred Iraqis, this future has been denied them for the sole reason that they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, victims of terrible circumstance. Let us be very clear why these and many other Iraqis, Americans, and British are dead, not to mention the hundreds of non-combatants who have already died, or who will die in the coming days: they are dead because of war, not because of a plausible but nevertheless speculative threat. They are dead because the leaders of two democratic nation-states took the decision to initiate a modern form of an ancient type of strife: war.

By doing so, the United States and Great Britain are not choosing the best or only remaining or most just form of resolving a conflict between them and the clearly undemocratic nation-state of Iraq. Rather, they are creating, in the clearest and most unambiguous way, a deadly and new conflict, one that did not exist before March 20th. As an anthropologist I study both conflict and conflict resolution in comparative perspective. Conflicts, disruptions in the social fabric, are ubiquitous in human history, both within communities and between groups of people. Methods of resolving conflict are diverse, ranging from peaceful negotiation to ritualized violence to the use of independent institutions like courts. But what unites each enduring form of conflict resolution is the desire to repair the rip in the social fabric, to return to a state in which social relations can continue as they were before.

In light of this, the current invasion of Iraq by U.S. and British forces will not resolve a current conflict—real or imagined—between Iraq and the so-called coalition of the willing, and nor will it ensure the type of national security often given as a rationale. If the current situation in Israel is proof of anything, it is that the use of extreme violence to create peace is doomed to failure. So if the war against Iraq cannot be a way to resolve conflict or ensure security, what is it then? It is, as the Prussian military philosopher von Clauswitz would describe it, a continuation of politics by other means. If this is true then we are left with this conclusion: that the invasion of Iraq is the bringing together of young Americans and British with young Iraqis so that they should kill and die with each other in order to advance American and British political interests. What these political interests really are is an open question. But what we do know is that these “masters of men,” these “inventors of slogans” “who urge us on to battle who . . . would have one man who works kill another man who works . . . who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live,” in the heartrending words of Dalton Trumbo, what we do know is that these masters of men have transformed war in the public imagination from what is really is—the profoundly antihuman low point in human relations—to something obscenely less consequential: a simple choice among a variety of tools for meeting political objectives.

It is up to us, therefore, as citizens in a democratic nation-state, whose leaders are our elected representatives, to understand war for what is really is, and what the consequences will be for allowing our representatives to so easily cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. If we understand war as a brutal tool for meeting ambiguous political goals, then we must also be prepared to accept the wide ranging human cost that is not peripheral to war, but actually goes to its very core. As Iraqi soldiers and civilians by the hundreds die with each passing day, and as American and British soldiers die or become permanently disabled, we as citizens in a democracy must accept the fact that we have indirectly set in motion the process that has led to war in a way that the citizens of Iraq have not. And finally, we must never forget, as we go about our days, the Iraqi people against whom we have unleashed this terrible political instrument. They are our kindred. Like us, they want only to live and they “want no quarrel.” Even though, as the protagonist of All Quiet on the Western Front finally realized when it was too late, a mere “word of command has made these silent figures our enemies,” they are not our enemies, and we have an obligation to remember this now as we have “never remembered anything else in [our] lives.”