Getting Beyond the Mainstream Debate

I attended a debate recently at my university between the College Republicans and the College Democrats. They both argued back and forth about how their candidate would essentially kill more terrorists than the other one would.

I felt like I was watching two ants fight over a leaf inside of an ant farm.

The audience was not allowed to speak, but I wanted to shout out, " have any of you ever thought that it might be more productive to stop trying to use war to make people love democracy, and start trying to set the right example so that people will choose it freely?"

Of course I couldn't say that, they probably would have looked at me with a blank stare anyway. Thinking outside of the tiny box called the "war on terror" is heresy in the United States right now. Like the ant in the ant farm would not have been able to comprehend the idea of me looking in at them through the plastic, these young college students, brought up with a kind of mainstream thinking found in the media have probably never had a thought like mine cross their short-term memory.

But I think Americans are good at heart, and if they knew the effects of their foreign policy on everyday people they wouldn't support it.

Juan Cole recently wrote an article called "If America Were Iraq, What Would It Be like?" Through proportional analogy, it makes clear how devastating our occupation is upon those people. If this were being done to America, we would consider the power doing it to be the most evil force in history, yet we can't seem to understand why the Iraqis are responding as they are.

Cole's article helps us perform the simple act of trying to understand another person's perspective. This helps us to explain the violence that we are seeing now related to the war on terror, especially what we are seeing in Iraq.

When the debate was over I passed out copies of the outline of my presentation "Alternatives to the War on Terror: Restraint, Cooperation, and Outreach." My presentation makes the point that we need to change our vision of how America will forge its relationship with the rest of the world. It's the idea that by framing it as a "war" we make it harder to achieve the goals that we all might agree we want to achieve: peace, prosperity, and security.

As good as I think my ideas are, it was the article by Cole that I should have been passing out to these young college students. I believe Americans are good at heart, and if they understood the impact of what we're doing to other people, they would call for change in American policy and government.

That's where the challenge is.

Getting a sufficient number of people to understand the hypocritical and contradictory nature of our relationship to the world and begin to expect it to be more consistent and less hypocritical, and become something that the rest of the world would really want, rather than something to be forced upon them.

Universal