On Wednesday, March 12th, professors of anthropology, communications, history, philosophy, and political science met to present answers to the question: “What have we learned from five years of war in Iraq?” This event was held from 6 pm to 8 pm in the lecture hall in the Student Recreation Center and was sponsored by the anthropology, philosophy, and political science clubs and the Ethics Center at Fresno State. Approximately 65 students and community members attended the hour long presentation and a second hour of questions and answers moderated by students from the participating organizations.
Historian Don Stillwell opened the discussion with a heroic attempt to explain, within the allotted 12 minutes, the thousands of years of history during which the divisions in modern Iraq developed. Dr. Ellen Gruenbaum of the Anthropology department spoke on the challenges of interacting with other cultures without either demonizing or infantilizing them, and on the current attempts by the United States military to do a better job in this respect with the help of anthropologists working on the Human Terrain System. Professor of Communications, Kevin Ayotte, argued that what can be learned from the current war is constrained by the words that we use to describe it. Dr. Andrew Fiala, a professor of philosophy, followed up with a discussion of the Iraq war in terms of Just War Theory, concluding that a truly just war is a myth. Our final speaker, Dr. Yashaiya Abosch of the Political Science department, brought out a theme that arose in a number of earlier panelists’ presentations: Who is ‘we?’ He argued that there is no realistic ‘we’ to learn lessons from the Iraq war, and expressed doubts that powerful and weak states can ever have a shared concept of justice.
During the following hour, panelists accepted questions from the audience about their presentations. Professor Gruenbaum closed the evening with a hopeful observation: The lecture hall was filled, for two hours, by people who could have left early, or not come at all, but who genuinely cared about learning something from current successes and failures in the war in Iraq.
Many thanks to our panelists for sharing their time and diverse expertise and to the student moderators: Steve Colagiovanni, Heather Balcom, Anthony Ferrucci, and Taylor Hartline.
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