Three years in Iraq and counting

[img1]As 2006 settles into springtime, the United States enters its third year of war in Iraq with little indication of when it will pull out. Civil war is imminent between the Shiites and Sunnis, Iraq's two major ethnic groups, and President Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low of 37 percent, according to a Gallup poll conducted between Feb. 28 and March 1.

The UW campus climate concerning the war has been decidedly negative, but quieter than controversial wars of the past, said Ashley Flowers, president of the Young Democrats of the UW

To date, more than 2,300 American soldiers have been killed, dwarfed by the 30,000 estimated Iraqi combat deaths and more than 100,000 casualties. The war has begun to cost more than $9 billion a month, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

"The general campus population is very opposed to the war in Iraq," Flowers said. "I think that because they don't host protests every week like they did in the '60s that people think that college students don't care. Resistance has become a dirty thing, made so by conservative media and think tanks, and so students have geared away from the protests of the old and are negotiating new forms of opposition."

UW campus leaders never doubted the war would be a prolonged endeavor.

"The way it started out, it didn't seem like it would be a quick thing," said Mary Nadjzin, vice president of the Muslim Students Association. "It's progressing toward a civil war."

In the past, very few wars have been completed in a short period of time, said Brent Ludeman, president of the UW College Republicans.

[img2]"History shows that these things are not something you can do in just a couple years," Ludeman said.

Decidedly, there is disagreement over whether the United States should have even gone to war or was justified in its decision. Ludeman believes Bush made the best decision he could under the circumstances.

"I think the president was justified with the information he had and that the information had all pointed to the conclusions that the president made," Ludeman said.

Nadjzin and Flowers think differently.

"We didn't go there to protect America, we certainly didn't go there to 'liberate Iraqis' -- we went there to serve the economic interests of the American government," Flowers said. "I don't agree with the justifications for going to war because there is no justification, there are a lot of lies."

Nadjzin described the decision to go to war as a "poorly planned entry" that didn't take into account the intense nationalism of the Iraqi people.

"I agree that Saddam Hussein was a horrible leader and needed to be removed, but I don't think going to war was necessarily the best move," Nadjzin said. "You have dictators all over the world, there was an obviously strategic political move."

Bush's comment to the media last week about the next president being responsible for "cleaning up the war" left neither Nadjzin, Ludeman nor Flowers surprised.

"At this point our president takes no responsibility for fixing any of the problems that he has created," said Flowers. "He shirks responsibility onto the next man or woman. The coming president will have to take the responsibility of fixing what has been broken, because it certainly won't happen with our current administration."