By Kyle Monson
First of all, I”d like to say that I”m a Bush supporter who loved Helen Thomas” speech at the Tuesday, Sept. 23, Forum. We don”t often get exposure to liberal opinions at BYU, and those who remember the Caleb Proulx fiasco of last year know we certainly don”t get much exposure to informed liberal opinions. And Helen Thomas is, if anything, informed.
One of my favorite things to say is “Everyone may be entitled to an opinion, but that doesn”t mean they”re qualified to have one.” You may not agree with her politics or her opinions, but anyone who knows even a little about Ms. Thomas” background would agree that she”s qualified to have an opinion. You can hear the pundits on Fox news or CNN wax philosophical about this or that presidential policy, but how many of them have met and worked in close quarters with every president since Kennedy?
I disagreed with a lot of things Ms. Thomas said in her speech, and I”m not sure what her motivation was for approaching it the way she did. All I know is she”s a smart woman who”s had some incredible experiences, and if she wants to talk about them and interpret them for me, I”ll listen.
Unlike your political science T.A., when Ms. Thomas spoke about President Nixon she was referring to memories, not hearsay or published memoirs. She can voice her opinion about Nixon”s policy regarding China because she was in China with him when he made his famous visit. Were you? No? Then sit down and listen.
I”m giving Ms. Thomas the benefit of the doubt regarding her speech. She knows Utah is a conservative state, and she must have figured out that BYU would be a conservative hotbed in a conservative state. If so, her intentions were even more noble – to expose university students to a different point of view. Thank you for that, Ms. Thomas.
The students, for the most part, responded well to the speech. I was sitting in the second row on the floor with a knot in my stomach, praying the audience wouldn”t boo her. Except for a few nincompoops, they didn”t. I was praying that students wouldn”t walk out on an honored guest of the school. Again, except for a few nincompoops, they didn”t. (A note to those nincompoops: An Associated Press reporter wrote a story about how angry students walked out on Thomas” speech. Any paper in America might have picked it up. The local papers all mentioned the fact in their stories, and it doesn”t make the rest of us look all that swell)
I loved her reaction to the obvious: “Democracy is wonderful, isn”t it?” It certainly is. We can all get along even with differences of opinion. Furthermore, isn”t being at this university a wonderful thing? Isn”t it healthy to be exposed to ideas and issues that might be outside our comfort level? That”s how we learn, and that”s how we become qualified to hold an informed opinion, just like Ms. Thomas is.
I”ve heard and read lots of opinions about the Iraq conflict, but I haven”t heard anyone, not even Ms. Thomas, say what to me is obvious: Our divergence of opinion stems from the divergence in perspective we have, and the different information we”ve collected on the subject.
The information surrounding the debate is so speculative and sketchy, it”s useless to argue about it when we can”t even agree on the small details. So a link between Al Queda and Iraq wasn”t found? That was never part of the issue for me, was it for you? If it was, of course you feel misled.
Some people say Bush is a liar because there aren”t WMD in Iraq. I believe the conflict was only partly about WMD, and the U.S. would be justified even if WMD were never found. Difference in perspective. Did Bush lie to us? I don”t know. Experts now are saying Iraqi defectors lied to interrogators about Iraq”s WMD program to deter the U.S. from committing troops. If that”s true, and it was a set-up that backfired, Bush was the deceived, not the deceiver. He was lied to, and he passed those lies on to us. That might stir you up a little, but you still don”t know what happened, do you?
Another issue is whether you believe it”s moral to go to war in defense of someone else. Even if America wasn”t in any kind of jeopardy from Saddam, the Iraqi people certainly were. I”ve heard commentators and pundits call Bush a heartless monster for committing U.S. troops to war against a country that did nothing to us. Even Thomas said “I don”t think that he cares enough about the poor and the sick and the maimed.”
The question is, which poor and which sick and which maimed? The Iraqis? The Kurds? If Bush really cared about the poor, the sick and the maimed, the only logical conclusion would be to go to war to get rid of Saddam. The dictator was starving his people (the poor), withholding medical supplies and gassing his people (the sick), and torturing his enemies (the maimed). Again, it”s all about perspective.
Why did America fight in World War I? It was to aid other people, even though our citizens weren”t directly threatened. What are U.S. forces doing anywhere near Liberia? Stepping in to prevent more loss of life in a conflict we have nothing to do with. Even in World War II, we could have responded to Japan after Pearl Harbor, and left Europe to rot under a dictatorship. Why didn”t we?02
There is a precedent for fighting for the freedom of others; Bush wasn”t the first to try it. I hope he won”t be the last, either. It”s all about perspective.
