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Canadian Jewish News: Absence of WMDs in Iraq doesn’t necessarily make war unjustified, says Wiesel
“[W]e must still give President George Bush credit for one important thing,” says Nobel Prize winner, Holocaust survivor, and BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74), in a Canadian Jewish News interview published on January 6. “Before the war in Iraq broke out, there was not a single news service in the world that didn’t say Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Leading political Israelis, the prime minister, the minister of defense, told me so several times. Israel did not want this war because it felt its most threatening enemy today is not Iraq, but Iran, which is currently developing nuclear weapons. But when the American president received his information, I told myself he did not have the right not to take it into consideration.
“The fact that these arms have not been found should not make us forget one irrefutable truth,” Wiesel continues. “Saddam Hussein was a savage ruler, a mass murderer, a mad assassin who had tens of thousands of Iraqis killed. When he had powerful weapons of destruction, he used them against his own people. How can we forget his villainous murders, his common graves, his torture chambers? I am happy that he is no longer there. If I had known then what I know now, would I have been for or against this war? I honestly don’t know.”
Washington Post: Extending reservists’ tours of duty would backfire
The Army is considering calling up reservists more frequently and for longer tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as Army Reserve commanders complain that their forces are at a breaking point, reports the January 7 Washington Post. But some defense experts say longer mobilizations for reservists could hurt military recruitment, which has fallen off recently for both the National Guard and the Army Reserve. “The reserves are already overstretched,” says Andrew Bacevich, a CAS and GRS professor of international relations, director of the Center for International Relations, and a retired Army colonel. “To change the rules will almost certainly backfire and accelerate the deterioration of the reserves.”
Boston Globe: Print news is for thinkers
With the proliferation of 24-hour cable news stations, television viewers can get up-to-the-minute updates, but how does such news coverage compare to print? “[W]hen you’re reading, your mind must refract the information through an additional layer of consciousness,” says Lance Morrow, a UNI professor, COM journalism professor, and former Time magazine writer, in the January 9 Boston Globe. “I do not believe that visual presentation of events is a way of thinking about those events. . . . TV is a feeling medium. You cannot watch a beheading by al-Qaeda without an intense physical reaction. If you [read] about that, you can think it over and process it. But if you simply watch a video of somebody having his head cut off, you cannot think about that clearly or rationally, because your body will have taken over the reactive process.”
And news parody programs, such as Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, can encourage “cynicism about the possibilities of truth through media” and “a false knowingness of the world,” Morrow says. “Because all this stuff encourages this sense that ‘I’m in on the joke and I’m savvy about these things,’ but you’re not really. You’re just responding to jokes. . . . One of the problems [of television news] is that the news constantly gives us moral dilemmas. To keep from going nuts, most people default to the conventional wisdom. Most don’t have the time to think through the details of every dilemma.”
21
December 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations