Iraq, Sudan, Tsunami: Campus Progress Speakers Come to George Washington U

By Marcus Mrowka, George Washington U

Campus Progress kicked off its campus speakers series last week to a packed room with an event at the George Washington University on America’s global responsibilities.

The event, “Iraq, Sudan, Tsunami, What Are America’s Responsibilities in the World?”, featured Gayle Smith, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Susan Rice, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Helle Dale, Director of Foreign Policy and Defense Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

The speakers all agreed that America has extensive responsibilities as the largest global player in the world, but there was sharp disagreement on what those responsibilities are.

“Increasingly [our threats] are transnational in nature,” said Rice. “Whether we’re talking about terrorism, issues of nonproliferation, disease, environmental degradation, international organized crime, all of those sorts of threats which increasingly define the world we live in.”

Rice argued that to tackle these transnational issues and protect its security, America needed effective cooperation with countries that have the will and capacity to cooperate with the U.S. Rice argued this cooperation has been eroded in the past few years and that America will have to show an interest in other countries’ interests if Americans want effective partnerships.

Dale took a different approach, arguing that the U.S. should only act where it is important to the U.S. and that America doesn’t have the “will or resources to change the entire world.”

Smith argued that without cooperation the U.S. would not be able to accomplish its agenda in the world.

“Unless there is a majority on the same side of the argument, I don’t care how many countries we invade, we’re still going to be waging an uphill struggle in that war of ideas,” she said.

The panelists also had differing opinions on America’s response to the tsunami disaster in Asia.

“I think [the U.S.] was blamed a little unfairly for not understanding the magnitude of the disaster to begin with,” Dale argued. “I think we have done more good in that arena than any other nation in the world.”

Smith and Rice commended the actions of the U.S. military in the days following the disaster, but said they wished the monetary response had been larger and sooner.

“When it comes to relative generosity,” said Rice. “America has a long way to go.”

The biggest disagreement came when the conversation turned to Iraq. While all three agreed that America must stay the course in Iraq, the similarities seemed to end there. Dale stressed Saddam Hussein’s misrule and the value of seeking democracy there, while Smith and Rice said the war was fought for the wrong reasons and cited the lack of an imminent threat.

“The sort of latter day reconstituted rationale for going into Iraq which is to light the fire of democracy so that it can be a beacon for the region is to me an unsatisfactory post facto rationale,” said Rice. “There’s not a great record of success of imposing democracy through the barrel of a gun.”

Dale explained the unfolding of the Iraqi conflict this way: “Saddam Hussein did the stupidest of all things, which was to brag about weapons he didn’t have,” Dale said, “and we bought it.”

Smith argued that Iraq was defining the United States’ entire foreign policy and that it was taking away from other responsibilities such as the crisis in Sudan, which she said was a national security interest.

“In Sudan we have a genocide being committed by a country which is still on the official State Department list of state sponsors of terror,” Smith said. “At the time we declared a genocide in Sudan our commitment was $2.3 million, that’s what we spend every thirty minutes in Iraq.”

“I think when you’ve got genocide under way and the government is the perpetrator, there is a moral imperative to act,” Rice said.

In contrast, Dale contended, “Sudan has no impact on United States national security.”

Smith cited a disparity between what the U.S. says about certain problems in the world and what the U.S. actually does.

“While we have pretty good rhetoric in light of what was said in the State of the Union and the President’s inaugural address, we’ve got very little action [in Sudan],” Smith said. “I would argue that the disparity between what we ourselves have declared a genocide on one hand and whether it’s a war against weapons of mass destruction or for democracy or however you want to define the war in Iraq as is problematic.”

Marcus Mrowka is a senior at George Washington University and an intern at Center for American Progress.