Wolfram Further Counters Hillman

Author: Nathalie Wolfram

I question the logic of Amber Hillman's "call for patriotism" ("Hillman Calls for Patriotism," The Middlebury Campus, Feb. 19, 2003) and ask that she weigh more carefully some of the disturbingly assumptions she makes in her argument that "the only way" to ensure safety for Americans is to take military action.
Hillman's reasoning demands that we accept that the value of an individual life is calculable and dependent on circumstances beyond one's control. Because we are Americans and innocent, she supposes, we are more entitled to life than equally innocent Iraqis.
By what moral code do we accept the killing of innocent civilians, who already suffer unspeakable poverty and political persecution at the hands of their own leader, now double damned by the United States, "the greatest nation in this world"? According to Hillman, we accept these killings as "just" because they will guarantee our future security.
Yet even if one accepts this crass attempt to quantify human worth, the obstacle remains that no formula exists to determine just how many innocent casualties would "ensure" the protection of America "in the face of evil." Since we know Iraq possesses no nuclear weapons and almost certaintly no long-range missiles or weapons capable of killing American civilians in America, we must ask first what threat Iraq actually poses to us "innocent" Americans, except to the soldiers the U.S. military will dispatch there.
Secondly, we must question how we could ever suppose to match the gravity of this alleged threat with Iraqi civilian deaths. The logic rapidly disintegrates.
"People are going to die before we can regain peace and stability," Hillman writes. Killing in the name of peace is political doublespeak worthy only of the current president.
Indeed, her language drips with Bush's rhetoric, which overwhelmingly favors sweeping generalizations and pseudo-religious invocations over concrete, truthful statements. Hillman reiterates Bush's war cry nearly verbatim, dismissing last week's worldwide protests as whimsical and selfish while neglecting to mention even once the actual findings (or lack thereof) of the U.N. weapons inspectors. Maybe the Iraqis are not the only "pawns" after all.
The ironic capstone to Hillman's remorseless concession of hundreds, thousands, or millions of Iraqi lives is her exhortation that we "realize the value of [our] own life." One who understands the value of his or her own life, I propose, respects the lives of others. Another Persian Gulf War would only reinforce the national self-delusion that war protects and preserves peace and stability, even as scant evidence exists that Iraq poses any domestic threat at all.
Before we allow war to become America's next favorite pastime, I ask that Hillman and others who rationalize the killing of innocent people reconsider a moral code that permits the suspension of justice under any circumstances.

Nathalie Wolfram is an English major from Scarsdale, New York.