Today I sat in my Politics of war class and sat down to a lector on the Iraq war. Unfortunately my professor is quite ill and has almost no voice and so he told us we would have to do most of the talking.He requested that we gather into small groups and list what we knew about the war. We had simple questions to answer: what kind of war was it , who the combatants and what was the Surge etc etc. Now I do not claim to know a whole lot about the Iraq war in all it's complexity. I am aware of the fighting between the Sunni and Shiites and the US alliance with most of the Shiites. Besides that and a bit about the Al-Qaeda, I'm not aware of a whole lot , still I got into the group of International Relations students assuming i was about to be informed. Strangely however , no one in my group knew a whole lot. Hardly anything , in fact. When the professor asked the class as a whole to share there was a heavy silence in the room.
I was horrified. In a class of college students, most of whom are studying international relations, no one knew the specifics of the war. They could not even tell you what it is about.
What kind of a country are we living in where the people don't even know why their soldiers are dying? Why is the media printing papers with celebrity marriages and dirty politicians social lives when there is a war going on that no one knows anything about? Why is it that news broadcasters are telling me about tests on organic vegetables and yet americans are being slaughtered and 90,000 refugees are driven from their homes every month?
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