Commentary: You call this foreign policy?

When a person believes that another person is threatening her safety in spite of there being no evidence to support her claims, we call it a self-reinforcing paranoid delusion. When government officials believe that another country poses an imminent threat to Americans despite having no credible evidence and proceed to conduct a drive toward war with that country, intending to seize control of its government and resources, we call it foreign policy.

If you've been listening to Ari Fleischer, you might believe that if we go to war with Iraq it will be because Saddam Hussein's government is developing weapons of mass destruction. Never mind the fact that in several weeks of inspections U.N. officials have found nothing to indicate a functioning chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program. Before these inspections took place the American people were made to believe that a failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would prevent a preemptive war. Now we're told that clean inspections mean only that the Iraqis must be hiding their weapons and refusing to cooperate with the international community, making war all the more necessary.

What else has the government lied to us about? If George W. Bush really cared about the murders of Iraq's ethnic minorities and political dissidents ordered by Hussein, wouldn't he condemn the actions of the Israeli government in Palestine or the Russian government in Chechnya? And if we really care about enforcing world nuclear disarmament, shouldn't we start with our own arsenal of over 15,000 nuclear warheads instead of funding domestic nuclear weapons research to the tune of $6 billion in the 2003 proposed military budget?

We have also been told that going to war in Iraq will allow the United States to remove Hussein from power and install a U.S.-friendly dictator in his place. This situation will, of course, be no more democratic than the current political environment in Iraq as it will not give the Iraqi people the right to choose their own leader. It will, however, give the United States unfettered access to the world's second largest reserves of oil, a resource lacking in other "enemy" countries, with enemy now framed as those who defy U.N. resolutions. As a side note, the United States and our closest ally, Israel, have defied more U.N. resolutions than the entire "axis of evil" put together.

The government has repeatedly denied that this war is about oil, but how can it be about anything else? There are many other anti-U.S. governments in the world, and we are not trying to force "regime change" in any of them. There are many dictators who commit human rights violations with regularity, and there are many countries that actually have the huge arsenals of illegal weapons of which we have no evidence in Iraq. None of these countries are coming under fire. The huge oil reserves make the situation in Iraq very different. Our current president and vice president's incredibly close ties to the oil industry only serve to drive the point home.

Popular support for a war in Iraq has fallen steadily over the past few months despite escalating media coverage of our government's relentless pursuit of war. Many polls now suggest that fewer than half of Americans support going to war, and those numbers are expected to drop even further as the possibility of a military draft is explored. Dozens of Duke students will join thousands of Americans in Washington, D.C., this weekend to protest a war in Iraq and the regular bombing and economic sanctions that have crippled the country for the last 10 years. Two independent collectives of students, faculty and administrators have formed in the last few months to promote alternatives to and dialogue about a potential war. All over the world people are attending demonstrations and speaking out in protest of a unilateral and preemptive American attack in the Middle East.

If we continue on this path toward unprovoked aggression, we will emulate more and more closely the foreign policies of nations we call enemies. Do we want to be part of a camp of nations that ignore international law and standards in pursuing their own economic and military interests, instigate illegal wars with other countries and sacrifice huge numbers innocent lives to their foreign policy machines? This is not the impression of our country that we should be sending to the world.

Jillian Johnson is a Trinity senior. Her column appears every third Thursday.