Dukakis setting a positive example
Walking to school Wednesday on Strathmore Avenue, I observed a man ahead of me picking up the litter he found along the way: toilet paper, candy wrappers, plastic cups ““ stuff we are accustomed to ignoring on our rushed walk to class.
This 73-year-old man, Wikipedia would tell me minutes later, was Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate.
During the five minutes I walked a few steps behind him, two questions came to my mind.
First, why does he do this? Second, why do we Westwood residents trash our beautiful campus so much?
The answers to the first question could vary. Dukakis is not campaigning any more, but he might be making a statement about how correcting little things can change society.
He seems to be walking his talk.
But then there’s the second question. During my years in Westwood, I have picked up a lot of trash from the fenced property on Levering and Strathmore.
I want to believe the manager when he tells me, jokingly: “It’s all the work of USC students.”
Yes, I want to believe his joke instead of concluding that we seem to be getting great educations but still do not appreciate the details that make up the great character of our university.
Gabriel Natividad
Graduate student,
UCLA Anderson School of Management
Troop surge will not make large impact
Almost two weeks ago, President Bush announced “The New Way Forward in Iraq,” which plans to add 21,500 American troops to the coalition forces presently on the ground in that nation.
However, our politicians and media pundits have done little to put the figure of 21,500 into perspective.
According to the Brookings Institution’s January 2007 Iraq Index report, there are presently 132,000 U.S. forces and 14,100 non-U.S. coalition forces in Iraq, for a total of 146,100 troops.
The proposed “surge” of American forces would increase the overall troop level to approximately 167,600.
This number by itself has little meaning unless it is compared to what the troop levels have been under previous strategies during the course of the last four years.
The Brookings’ report gives a detailed month-by-month account of the coalition troop levels beginning with May 2003, the third month of the war.
However, during November and December 2005, the troop level was at 183,000, a larger number than the proposed 167,600.
Thus, the surge is not a “new strategy … (that) will change America’s course in Iraq” as Bush claims, but a previously attempted troop level that does not even approach the 183,000 peak. While the plan’s greater concentration of troops in Baghdad might minimize the violence there, the plan does not attempt to extend the sovereignty of the Baghdad government to the rest of the nation.
As any political science student will tell you, the fundamental characteristic of the nation-state is that the government has a monopoly of force within its borders in order to secure its territory.
To understand whether this plan is likely to bring about a victory, one more relevant comparison can be made between the troop levels of the current Iraq war and the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
To accomplish the much more limited objective of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the U.S. had deployed more than 500,000 troops and our coalition partners had contributed about 160,000, according to CNN.
On the other hand, in order to accomplish the broad objectives of invading, occupying, and pacifying an entire nation, the number of coalition forces deployed has been less than a third than the force assembled for the 1991 conflict.
Thus, the less than 200,000 troops that have been in Iraq seem to be a drastically small force to accomplish such a large mission.
Ironically, what the administration calls “The New Way Forward” is in reality several steps backward to a previously ineffective troop level.
A true surge might entail a doubling or tripling of our forces, which is not presently possible with our smaller military and commitments elsewhere.
Most importantly, whenever we put the lives of American soldiers on the line, it is the responsibility of the American people to question whether our leader’s plan has any foreseeable victory so that our sons, daughters, husbands and wives do not perish needlessly.
Kyle Gilde
Fourth-year, history