Current U.S. foreign policy in Iraq has damaged the nation's reputation abroad, and the U.S. should make every effort to avoid going to war with Iran, several experts said during a symposium on Iraq and Iran held in Katzen Arts Center's Abramson Recital Hall Thursday evening.
The symposium, titled "Surge or Scourge? The Truth About Iraq and Iran You Won't Learn from Petraeus, Bush, or Cheney," featured two panels of speakers who discussed a number of topics relating to the Iraq war, the threat of a nuclear Iran, the general direction of U.S. foreign policy and the U.S.'s reputation in the Middle East.
Several of the panelists said they thought current U.S. foreign policy decisions were damaging the nation's reputation in other areas of the world.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney "have destroyed our cultural values" through their development of a unilateral U.S. foreign policy that led the United States into the war in Iraq, said Peter Kuznick, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute.
Akbar Ahmed, a professor in the School of International Service and former Pakistani ambassador to Great Britain, reminisced about the "former culture of the 1960s" that emphasized such values as diplomacy, cooperation and justice. The world's admiring attitude toward America immediately after the Cold War was strikingly different from the current, negative world perception of the U.S., he said. Ahmed warned the audience of the existence of a "chasm of misperception between the Muslim world and the American world."
The war in Iraq was fueling Middle Eastern dislike of American foreign policy and was a major platform for al-Qaeda recruitment, said Max Friedman, a CAS professor.
Kate Monsted, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she went to the event in hopes of "hearing about the situation objectively" instead of relying on conventional sources like the media and the government.
Monsted said she was impressed by what the speakers had to say.
"It has given me so much to think about, especially the ability to see things from the perspective of the Islamic world, which I think is very important," she said.
Beth Laruni, a sophomore from the United Kingdom currently studying abroad at AU, said the only adjective she could find to summarize the symposium was "brilliant."
"It has brought up a lot of questions for me regarding why we are in our current global situation when we have such a wealth of information," she said.
