Countries helped by United States will eventually end up fighting us
COMMENTARY
Jeff Dennis

The United States has not learned its lesson in its international “missions” — giving “allies” money and training their troops to fight will only end in our own demise.

How do you explain war to our generation? We watched Desert Storm on TV in our grade school years, but did the true magnitude of war really register with us? We have watched the United States perform many peacekeeping missions, being told that our military is defending democracy and freedom around the world.

We are a generation of violent movies, TV shows and video games, to a point that seeing a few hundred of “the enemy” die on TV is not really anything new.

President Bush recently allotted $92 million to train the Iraqis who oppose Saddam Hussein. The intent of this is apparently to promote regime change in Iraq, which we may or may not see in the future.

Unfortunately, it seems we’ve not learned our lesson though. The Iraqi opposition forces will no doubt gladly accept our money and military training, but will they continue good relations with the United States if they are able to gain power? We’ve already seen the Taliban troops in Afghanistan fighting with the U.S. weapons we gave them during Afghanistan’s war with Russia. As history goes, it seems likely that if there is a regime change in Iraq, we’ll probably be fighting the new Iraqi government in a few years, and both sides will be using American weapons.

The closest thing to war persons of our age can identify as “real” is the threat of terrorism. It is one thing which actually poses a threat to the safety of our homeland. However, we hear less and less about the war on terrorism now, aside from the occasional “high alerts” that much of the public has come to accept as a regular occurrence.

Al Qaeda certainly seems to pose a bigger threat to our way of life than Saddam Hussein does right now, as it has clearly established that it works as an almost intangible enemy. With terrorist cells across the world, and likely in our own country, there is no visible enemy, and this will not change at all if we are able to oust Hussein from power.

Maybe my skepticism is too harsh, and President Bush really does want to extinguish the “evildoers” of the world, and the war with Iraq is a necessary step. If this is the case though, he is certainly ignoring many more evildoers around the globe, and coincidentally, many are in countries that aren’t large oil producers.

There are wars going on in Africa that have been raging for many years. Children grow up in some African countries and cannot even remember a time when there was peace in their country.

But we rarely hear any media coverage about these wars. You might have seen a few of the Lost Boys of Sudan, some of whom work at TCU. These young men have come to America to escape the war in their home country of Sudan, which has been going on for much of their lives.

They have seen atrocities far worse than anything Americans ever see on television. They could tell you more about war than you’ve ever wanted to know. We certainly aren’t going to learn about it from the newest Playstation 2 game.

Jeff Dennis is a senior sociology major from Gail.