Since its beginnings in March of 2003, the Iraq war has brought our country together and torn it apart. It has plunged the national budget into its deepest deficit ever and bitterly separated us from many of our old allies—not to mention launching Iraq itself into seemingly incurable chaos. If there is any struggle that university students should be organizing and rallying against, the war in Iraq is it.
The Voice finds the absence of an organized anti-war movement at Georgetown hard to swallow. Our paper has been defined, since its inception in 1969, by the promotion of free speech and an unflinching opposition to unjust wars. The falsehoods and lies that brought us into the conflict have all been invalidated; the goal of democratizing Iraq seems an afterthought now, and our civil liberties at home are curtailed more and more with each passing week—through tapping our phones, tracking our searches on Google or suspending habeas corpus for anyone arrested on terrorism charges.
A number of existing student groups at Georgetown have an interest in demanding a solution in Iraq, be it the withdrawal of our troops, admitting our wrongs and begging the international community for help or otherwise. The College Democrats, Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine and STAND come immediately to mind.
At schools across the country, groups like these have admitted this common ground and protested the war. Last spring, in fact, when President Bush visited Stanford University, the school’s chapter of STAND helped organize a protest that forced him to relocate his meeting to Stanford’s outskirts.
The first chapter of STAND was organized at Georgetown, and it has since spread to over 200 campuses across the country. There is no reason why we could not give rise to a widespread movement against this unjust war and the terrible policies coming in its wake. Student protests, lest we forget, were decisive in rallying national opinion three decades ago, against a similar invasion to crush an equally nebulous enemy “-ism.” All students, whatever their political affiliation, should be gravely concerned with the threat to our civil liberties.
For the class of 2007, the war in Iraq has defined their time at Georgetown, and it is very unlikely to end before they graduate. There could be no better senior gift than a strong, concretely organized voice to end the fighting. Over 2,700 US soldiers have died in the fighting along with 655,000 Iraqis. The wounded are too many to count. With each new day, with each additional drop of blood that is spilled, this war becomes a greater weight on our consciences. It is time we organize.
