Monday night in a forum entitled, ‘The War and Its Aftermath,” a handful of University of Wisconsin professors addressed a crowded room of students, teachers, other professors and local citizens about the ongoing issues associated with the conflict in Iraq and current international affairs.
The Office of International Studies and Programs, which sponsored the forum, hoped to focus primarily on the events related to the United States’ military action and its aftermath in Iraq.
Gilles Bousquet, dean of International Studies and co-organizer of the event, said the forum was a response to public demand.
“On this campus, there is a great need and desire to discuss these issues,” Bousquet said.
The forum began with each professor giving a brief introduction of various topics to the audience as a whole. Then it was followed by a breakout session where members of the audience chose an issue they wanted to discuss further with a specific professor and went to another room to do so.
Professors attended from a variety of fields, including international studies, political science, sociology, African languages and literature, history and journalism and mass communication. They lectured on topics such as foreign policy, media coverage of the war and the future of the United Nations.
Joe Elder, UW professor in sociology, and David Morgan, UW history professor and director of Middle East studies, talked about the past and possible future of the United Nations and Iraq.
“Iraq was an artificial assembly of areas by the British government for the convenience of the British government,” Morgan said of British rule over Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious groups. “The future of Iraq may have more to do with Islam than the past 80 years.”
Meanwhile, other professors took a stance in the present with the issues both Americans and Iraqis are facing.
Michael Barnett, UW political science professor and director of the international studies major, said there were two possible movie scenarios about the outcome of the war: “Armageddon II” or “Field of Dreams II: You Bomb and They Will Come.”
“I think it is a blending of the two movies where in the beginning there is social rebellion but followed by reform,” Barnett said. “But American-style reconstruction looks more like American liberation.”
Another debated issue was that of media coverage during the war, which was addressed by Moneera al-Ghadeer, professor in African languages and literature, and Jack Mitchell, professor in journalism and mass communications.
“The war in American media was a fictional staging of entertainment that had little resemblance of human suffering in Iraq,” al-Ghadeer said. She argued that the audience was removed from any ethical realization into a denial of the war as a real event.
However, Mitchell stated that the American media did not have a choice about portraying the war in Iraq in this manner because the Bush administration and military public relations control the information that the media feeds the public.
“The media is audience-driven — they want to show the Americans as the good guys,” Mitchell said.
The forum was followed by seven different breakout sessions, which either elaborated on one of the lecture topics from the forum or presented another issue, such as Turkish-Kurdish relations.
“Knowing more about the world rather than less is very important,” Bousquet said.
