The United States will have to make tough choices in Iraq after problems in the country since last spring’s war, speakers at a panel sponsored by the Boston University Arab Students Association said Thursday night.
Speakers also discussed the inability of the United States to sustain the current forces deployed in Iraq at the panel ‘Read Between the Pipelines,’ which was the main event of the group’s Iraq Awareness Week.
Four speakers, including two BU professors, addressed a crowd of about 35 people in the College of Arts and Sciences. Each speaker talked for about 20 to 25 minutes, and audience questions capped off the evening.
Members of the panel included anthropology and international relations professor Richard Norton, modern foreign language professor Shaker Mustafa, Children of Iraq activist Mel Lehman and a daughter of a former Iraqi king, Nisreen El Hashemi.
Norton said if the United States plans on staying in Iraq for a long period of time, it will need to make decisions about how to keep troops in the area because it cannot sustain a force of 130,000.
Norton added that the United States cannot support the 48,000 more reserve troops planned to be called into service.
To keep the occupation of Iraq alive, the United States may have to institute a draft, but the country will definitely have to garner more international support, he said.
El Hashemi the only female speaker touched on experiences in her life and her connections to the Iraqi crown. She described her experiences at an anti-war protest in New York last winter, saying police pushed her around and beat her when she attempted to enter the demonstration.
‘I got beaten by a stick, and then he tried taking from me the Iraq flag,’ El Hashemi recalled. ‘He was pulling it, and at that time, I prayed to God. I felt that he was taking my soul away from me, and I was screaming at him and holding the flag back and I said, ‘Stop taking my flag. You will never touch this flag. This is my country’s flag.”
El Hashemi also talked about an interview with an Arabic magazine during which she was asked why she thought America is called the ‘land of dreams.’
‘You have someone like President Clinton who had nothing. He dreamed to be, one day, the president of the United States,’ she said. ‘He worked hard, and he became president of the United States. And then you have someone as stupid as Mr. George W. Bush, who knows nothing about anything, and he became president of the United States.’
As El Hashemi watched the first days of the Baghdad bombing in March, she said she saw reports of her grandfather’s palace being bombed, which also included the cemetery in which his body was buried.
‘I had felt like my family was killed for a second time … unlike most of you, or many of you, I never even see a grandfather,’ she said. ‘I have only my father and my brother. I was hoping one day to go to Baghdad just to hug the grave of my grandfather.’
CAS sophomore Rory Gill said he enjoyed the event but thought the speakers’ views were too one-sided.
‘Even though I think going into Iraq was a mistake, I would have liked to have heard dissenting views from the board,’ he said.
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