Staff editorial

A resolution for no-war resolutions

Last week, The Daily came out against a pro-war resolution working its way through the ASUW Senate. Since the first resolution last week, an anti-war resolution and a resolution of student unity have both surfaced. While The Daily editorial board does not believe student body opinion is united in favor of the war, neither is it united against it.

A resolution of student opposition -- or support -- of the war in Afghanistan makes a unilateral assumption about a diverse student body. In a conflict that engenders a strong enough reaction to overflow a student senate meeting, one thing can be said for sure: not everyone feels the same.

Blanket assumptions that cover an entire constituency cover our eyes from the right way to approach an issue like war. In a situation like this, the ASUW needs to respect student-body opinion instead of dictating it, by backing off and letting individual students make individual decisions on the rightness or wrongness of our government's actions.

Stop stealing their glory!

President Bush needs to step outside the realm of every other politician and stop taking credit for policy outside his direction. It's enough that Bush is seen as the personified military hunting down "evil-ones" in the East. Now he's calling for United States. to hunt down those immigrants illegally using visas inside the country. This is misleading, since the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has been in the business of enforcing appropriate visa use for decades.

In 1993, when the first World Trade Center bombing occurred, the INS proposed revising its paper system of tracking visas and began producing a database to convert paper to electronic filing. After Sept. 11, INS security was tightened even more. Bush isn't giving the INS due credit. A front-page article in Tuesday's New York Times quoted Bush saying, "We plan on making sure if a person has applied for a student visa they actually go to a college or university." This is not a new idea, nor Bush's idea at that. It's time for Bush to concentrate on promoting positive NEW developments, not reiterating established policy and making it his own.