After lurching towards war amidst an alarming absence of Congressional debate, America conducted the war with an alarming absence of independent oversight. We recognize the need to protect military secrecy, but the Pentagon's wartime press restrictions were unduly harsh.
Finally, there is George Bush's New World Order, which, as Bush describes it, is a Totally Unattainable Ideal. We deterred aggression in the Middle East, not the world. We established American military credibility is the Middle East, not the world. America is not the world's policeman, nor should it be, nor can it be, no matter how much Congress inflates our military-industrial complex. If Bush thinks the U.N. would mobilize to defend Ethiopia from Mussolini (as the League of Nations failed to do), he is sadly mistaken.
THE CRIMSON does not support wars very often. There aren't too many necessary wars out there to fight. We hope America's success in this one does not breed a jingoistic overconfidence in military solutions. We hope the demonization of Saddam Hussein does not inspire anti-Arab sentiment back home, or an insistence on unreasonable reparations from Iraq. (The lessons of World War I are relevant today, too.
We hope Bush is not so foolish as to think that the Gulf War will magically solve the problems of Middle East instability. He should continue to press for a regional security system, as well as a solution to the Palestinian question consistent with the principles of self-determination and security for all peoples. We also hope Bush does not take Syrian dictator Hafez El-Assad's meager contributions to the coalition war effort as evidence that this brutal despot can be trusted during peacetime.
Finally, we hope that Bush can find the time to address the domestic crises that have received short shrift over the last six months. We're not out of the recession yet. We still don't have an energy policy. Our schools are still falling apart. We still have a mindboggling budget deficit.
Rather than celebrate our military victory, our nation should breathe a sigh of relief that the bloodshed has ceased and begin to concentrate on the future. The time for killing is over. The time for healing has begun.