Petition to End the Wars Month: Wichita State

Wichita State held a Petition to End the Wars event this past Wednesday and Thursday.  They were able to interact with a number of students; Wichita State YAL's president, Andrew Cranmer, wrote an account of the event here.

Here are some highlights:

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St. Cloud Chapter Hosts Successful Anti-War Event!

On Wednesday the St. Cloud State University YAL chapter hosted an event to petition against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan barely twelve hours after making an appearance at the College Republicans' event "Why Am I Conservative?" making an effort to outeach to both the fiscal and social conservative movements.

While the anti-war protest was politicized by some less classically-liberal students and the administration tried to shut us down, claiming that we had not followed procedure to secure our location, they eventually admitted that they had a reservation for the group. "Student groups aren't allowed to post things to the building," said a man from the programming office, "But those cement walls over there are fine."

Despite the red tape and some student-group politics, our chapter managed to collect more than 250 signatures in support of H.R. 248 - to present to our Representative, Michele Bachmann - while increasing our group size 50% in a single day.

"Bad things may happen in Iraq if we pull out. And they will happen anyway if we stay."

Indeed, they will.  Ron Paul's simple argument that "we just walked in; we can just walk out" of our foolish involvements in the Middle East continue to ring true -- and the fact that we can just pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan is well argued by Tom Englehardt at the American Conservative:

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.

And yet, despite claims from the administration that the war is on its decline (claims which may or may not prove reliable and, even at best, will not result in a complete withdrawal of American involvement from Iraq), we still have a large military presence in Iraq, and many still contend that we need to continue it:

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us.... In the year to come, based on what we’re seeing now, such arguments may intensify. Terrible prophecies about Iraq’s future without us may multiply. And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq.

When holding the hammer...

"When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the marjority of men live content." - Niccolo Machiavelli

As the United States continues to hold a hammer, everything looks more and more like a nail.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems like an ancient battle between good and evil, where both good and evil are relative to the agent.  But people often misname the crisis:  It should be read “The Israeli-American-Palestinian Conflict” with “American” strategically sandwiched in between the original two contenders. The Middle East has continued to be a hotbed of problems because of unnecessary involvement ever since the West chose to divvy the Ottoman Empire rather than allowing each region to claim its own sovereignty as America did during and after its Revolution. Rather than witnessing the natural evolution of states, the West forced state boundaries, leading to many of the problems we have today.