Staff Editorial | Vassar students must maintain Iraq War activism

Four thousand dead in Iraq, national news headlines announced at the end of March. On March 20, memorials and protests worldwide marked the fifth anniversary of the second American invasion of Iraq. Three days later, the Associated Press reported that the death toll in Iraq for American servicemen had reached 4,000. Vassar was quiet.

Analyzed in classes, rued in art, berated by visiting gurus and castigated in sporadic student panels, Iraq has clouded the political landscape for most of current Vassar students’ adult lives. But many students have expressed a sense of fatigue with the war and protests against it. It’s hazy, its borders and ends are ill-defined, and it’s far, far away.

A brief look into The Miscellany News archives of the past five years yields no shortage of conversations on Iraq. Each fall, students have written at least five letters to the editor, columns, editorials or panels that are all about the war. Whether criticizing it or criticizing the criticism (one student writing in 2004 indicted other student activists as “self-righteous” and insincere; another writing in 2007 called opposition itself “selfish”), Vassar students have not failed to talk about Iraq.

Each year since the war began in 2003, there has also been at least one major protest against the war, with anywhere between 13 and 100 students and faculty going to New York City or Washington, D.C. But these too are in the bleakest months of winter, when the campus seems dreary and subdued.

And just as the visibility of the war seems seasonal, campus consciousness of it has faded over time, with fewer and fewer students writing about the war, painting it, protesting it or making any other form of public testimonial. Overall, the pattern of students’ public feelings about the war seem at some level to mirror soldiers’ descriptions of their experiences abroad: long stretches of boredom punctuated by horror.

But Vassar students have engaged with issues other than the war through a combination of digital and traditional means. Abortion, gay marriage, the farm bill, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, campaign finance reform, voter registration—the list goes on —are examples of issues that push Vassar students to show up at protests, speak out in loud numbers and to write vehement letters to the editor. However, a war that costs countless American and Iraqi lives fades into the background. Why?

It’s not that college students nationwide have retreated from demonstrating against the war and keeping up with it. At Swarthmore College, for example, students listen to and help to run a radio station completely dedicated to Iraq: “War News Radio.”

Is it a class issue? Most members of the armed forces are from working-class backgrounds. Most Vassar students are not.

Is it the supreme ambivalence that many feel about how to get out of Iraq now that American troops are there?

Is it that Vassar students have distanced themselves from Iraq because it is, as JFK called the Cold War, “a long twilight struggle,” one that requires more thought, attention, activism and patience than most people have? The frustration of not having a clear-cut answer to rally behind might repel some students who are not sure what simple slogans their signs at a protest should declare.

The argument that Vassar students are apathetic is tired, cliché and decidedly untrue. However, students must make stronger efforts to ensure that the Iraq War continues to resonate on campus. First, most people don’t like this war, but it will not end unless students like us demonstrate that we care about it. Second, whether you care most about campaign finance reform or education, a war that costs $5,000 a second has to be addressed before you can hope for long-term solutions to the issue about which you care most.

The Iraq War may be a long twilight struggle, but it is ours to fight.

—The staff editorial reflects the opinion of at least two-thirds of the 14-member editorial board.