Students trekked to Dartmouth Hall in droves yesterday to hear Professors Ronald Edsforth of the history department and Allan Stam of the government department take on opposing sides of the debate over a potential war in Iraq.
While Stam supported the war for moral reasons, Edsforth stressed his opposition to any military involvement in Iraq.
"We are party responsible for his being there in the first place," Stam said of Saddam Hussein. "It's time to 'fess up to our responsibilities," he added, implying the need for the United States to remove the Hussein regime from power in Iraq.
"If we go to war without a declaration of war," Edsforth said, "this would be grounds for impeachment." He repeatedly quoted the Constitution -- Congress has the power to declare war -- and compared action without such a declaration to the imperialistic wars of "18th century despots."
Edsforth began the debate, calling an attack of Iraq an "unjust war of aggression against a country that has not attacked us and does not threaten us imminently."
Edsforth spoke primarily on the motives of the Bush administration for a war in Iraq. In his view, the administration is using the pretense of an Iraq that is a danger to the world as a means for securing their own interests in the Middle East.
The war in Iraq, he said, "is an attempt to implement the National Security Strategy Plan," which states that the U.S. should have an unprecedented degree of military power in the world.
"The U.S. assumes the right, reserves the right, to preemptively attack any nation that it deems a threat to our national interests," Edsforth said.
In the United States' efforts to restructure the Middle East, he said, "Iraq presents the best possibility," due to its large oil reserves -- the second largest in the world.
He compared the battle over the Iraqi oil fields to the war of resources that occurred when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, "which destroyed the League of Nations," he said. If the United States were to go ahead with military action against Iraq, he argued, it would destroy the power of the United Nations in a similar manner.
"These are very smart, I'd even say ruthless people," Edsforth said, referring to the Bush administration, "to take our men and women and not just to put them in harm's way, but to make killers of them."
Stam then rebutted Edsforth's argument, claiming that "the U.S, had a moral responsibility to remove the Hussein regime."
"I don't personally care what George Bush's motives are, or what Dick Cheney's motives are," Stam said. He later asked the audience to think of their own reasons why they would or would not support a war, but to think of genuine reasons for their stance.
Stam listed coups in which the United States has been active since 1949, including the imposition of governments in Iran, Syria, and Iraq, and the military aid to the party in Afghanistan that would become the Taliban.
"Between 1980 and 1988 the U.S. tried to play a devilishly cute policy of Realpolitik in the Iran-Iraq War," Stam said. "We supplied weapons to both sides."
Stam claimed that war would be used as a last resort in this case, because other measures such as economic sanctions and containment have not been deterrence to Saddam Hussein's regime, but have instead punished the people of Iraq.
Citing the humanitarian violations in Iraq under Hussein, and in other Middle Eastern nations, he said, "We have a moral responsibility -- as we do in Afghanistan -- to remove these regimes."
But Stam did not advocate that the United States use force to topple all repressive regimes. He compared the situation to that of Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After the example set by the liberation of East Germany, other nations that had been behind the Iron Curtain came into democracy peacefully, and without outside intervention. The Middle East, he said, had no such example as of yet.
Stam did address the aspect of oil, which makes a policy of isolationism in the United States nearly impossible.
"For better or for worse, the entire world economy is dependent on cheap oil, and the cheapest energy in the world lies in the Middle East," he said, approximating the cost of extracting crude oil from that region of the world at 4 cents per gallon.
