They nearly lynched me.

Here's my letter to the class. When I wrote it I knew it would cause mixed feelings but I really didn't care. Since then we had a class discussion about it and I think we are all okay.


Open Letter to CMCN 304 class

If you don’t have the patience to read this entire e-mail, please skip to the last paragraph because I spoke to our instructor about something and you all need to know what she said.

When I read all the notes on our first presentation topic I became alarmed. During the quiz I could barely hold back my frustration. I find I must speak out for my own peace of mind.

Let me try to explain why. It is NOT because I have any special knowledge about the war. I have tried to follow events in the news on a daily basis. Anything I have read about it comes from the mainstream press. I try to read from a variety of sources and political leanings, so that I can form an intelligent and balanced opinion. If anything sets me apart it is that as a philosophy major I have learned to think critically about a variety of issues, to identify good and bad reasoning, and to evaluate evidence.

I was disappointed by the presentation notes because the evidence presented just did not support the conclusions offered. The notes were full of bad reasoning, insufficient evidence, untrue assertions, and questionable assumptions. I will cite examples of what I’m talking about.

President Bush’s inaugural speech is not good evidence. President Bush is in the position of having to justify his decision to go to war. He is not an unbiased source. We need unbiased information if we want to find out if the reasons offered are good ones. Likewise for any of the other architects of the war. In case you think I’m coming down on one side or the other, I’ll say this: Kerry’s speech didn’t count either. He was running against Bush at the time. Generally speaking, political speeches of any kind are not trustworthy sources of information.

No one presented in the notes any connection between the events of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. As far as I know there is none. The administration has been very careful in the way they talk about this. They often mentioned 9/11 in the same breath with Saddam Hussein, implying that there is some connection. But the only connection I know of is that 9/11 was an act of terrorism and Saddam Hussein is also labeled as a terrorist. No evidence has surfaced that Saddam was in any way involved with 9/11.

Homeland security was being implemented before we went to war with Iraq – it’s not a result of the war. So, anything in the presentations about homeland security was beside the point. The question was “Is America more secure as a result of the war in Iraq.”

There were no weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam was not capable of producing any. Iraq was not a danger to the US. The intelligence the administration relied on in making its decision was flawed. They have admitted that. (No one included the admission in their presentation notes.) So, either the administration made a mistake in trusting the info, or they went ahead knowing the info was flawed. Which is worse? (There were a lot of people speaking up at the time saying that the info was flawed, but the admin refused to pay attention.) What the weapons inspectors found was that Saddam was doing his best to maintain his ability to resume production. Any other country on the earth would want to do the same under those circumstances. Iraq still needed to defend itself from its neighbors. Saddam was deceiving the inspectors to keep the neighboring countries guessing about Iraq’s capabilities. He was bluffing.

We are trying to eliminate terrorism – the Iraq war has been a boon to terrorism. Yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator. But there was not rampant terrorism under his regime. Now Iraq is the world’s leading breeding ground of terrorists. Iraq has become a terrorism magnet and no doubt new alliances are being forged daily. No one mentioned this in their notes.

Someone has to explain how war overseas prevents terrorism here in America, considering most of the 9/11 terrorists were Syrian and none of them (I think) came from Iraq. I suppose people think it’s all the same because all of these countries are “in the mideast” and they’re all “arabs” so they’re all the same. If anything has prevented terrorism here it is our homeland security efforts, not the war.

Creating mideast democracies – the idea is that if those countries are democratic, the people would like us better. This is a questionable assumption. Even if it’s true, is that a reason to go to war? Should we go to war with every undemocratic nation?

I’m not even going to start in on the idea that the war is good for the Iraqis, since that has not come up yet in class. Likewise with the funding issues.

Obviously I am not grading the class and I cannot tell anyone what to do. The purpose of this e-mail is just to encourage everyone to take this project seriously and to make a decent attempt to look at more than one side. Like most of you, I do not have hours upon hours to devote to research for this class. I work a full-time job, I have a full-time course load, and I am a full-time husband and parent. But I take all my classes seriously. I am 31 years old and working toward my first degree and I am not here to fool around.

Everyone in the class knows someone who knows someone who is fighting today in Iraq. How deeply are we going to look at this issue? There are serious objections to the war in Iraq. Hopefully I have given you some idea of what those objections are based on. I believe we owe it to our fellow Americans serving overseas to try to understand these issues, no matter what side of the issue we choose to be on in the end. Good people are dying every day. As voting Americans we have a duty to make sure that our leaders are doing the right thing, and to hold them accountable if they have not done the right thing.

I hope I have expressed myself without offending anyone. I am open to differences of opinion and I am not trying to attack anyone personally.

On a side note – this has nothing to do with what I have written so far: After class last night I approached our instructor and asked her about the research guidelines for the class. In a previous class she had stated that our research should be scholarly. I asked her if that was still true, and she said that it was. The reason I asked her is that in most of the notes there was no indication whatsoever what the sources were. It is not required that we share our sources with each other, but it will probably help us get a good grade if we let each other know when we’ve found a valuable source of information.