Two and a half years after the American invasion of Iraq, it is time to take stock. More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed, more than 15,200 wounded, and countless more will suffer the psychological consequences of the war, including an unreported number of suicides among discharged soldiers.
Iraqi deaths are more difficult to estimate. However, it is likely that somewhere between 35,700 and 72,100 Iraqi civilians, if not more, have died in the violence unleashed by the American invasion and the subsequent civil disorder. This means that for every U.S. serviceman who has lost his or her life in Iraq, 20 or 30 noncombatant Iraqis – men, women and children – have lost their lives. (There are, to our knowledge, no estimates of the number of Iraqis wounded or traumatized.) Despite the presence of 152,000 U.S. troops, a level of commitment that has held fairly constant throughout the occupation, Iraq now serves as a combat zone for external jihad groups. A civil war, pitting large numbers of Iraqi insurgents against the new government, is now in progress and the sectarian split in the results of the recent referendum on the new Iraqi constitution suggests that the legitimacy of the new regime will continue to be violently contested.
For American college students, these facts bear a special relevance. It is their cohorts, many from less privileged backgrounds but nevertheless sharing their birth and graduation dates, who are being sent to Iraq to do the killing and to be killed. And it is they who are subject to aggressive recruitment campaigns by the U.S. military to staff a prolonged military occupation, an occupation that puts their lives and their souls at risk.
In response to this threat, groups across the country have called for a student walk-out on Nov. 2 to protest the American-led war in Iraq, to call for an end to the military’s aggressive recruitment of American teenagers and to demand a definite timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Student groups at Boston University and at other college campuses in the Boston area are helping to organize this nationwide protest.
While we will not cancel classes, we wish to identify with the objectives of this action. As teachers of a generation that is being made to carry the burden of an illegitimate and immoral war, we feel that we have an obligation to support this student initiative in whatever way we can. Some of us will devote our classes on Nov. 2 to aspects of our course curricula that are relevant to understanding the situation in Iraq. As the 2,000th American soldier is laid to rest, the 50,000th – or 70,000th – Iraqi civilian victim of the war is being laid to rest. The latest cycle of violence in Iraq, touched off by the U.S. invasion, continues. It is time that we take action to draw public attention to the increasingly hopeless cause of a military occupation that is not serving to bring peace or to preserve and enhance life in the country of Iraq. Therefore, we – the under-signed – express our support for the student walk-out on Nov. 2, and encourage students to exercise their political voice for a more just and more humane U.S. foreign policy on that day and hereafter.
Sofia Perez Associate Professor of Political Science
John Gerring Associate Professor of Political Science
David Lyons Professor of Law and Philosophy
And other members of the Boston University Faculty for a Humane Foreign Policy
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