2011 Student Writing Awards Booklet - Santa Fe Community College

end and invaded France through the Netherlands and Belgium (64).
The fear driving us to build the wall on the United States and Mexico
border harms us more than it helps us to be safe.Think about the wall that
Israel has built on its border with Palestine.The result has not made Israel
safer. It has caused more hostility between the two states.
The Critical Thinking section of “The New World Reader” quotes
Harold Hongju Koh, Our enemies in this war are out to destroy
our society precisely because it is open, tolerant, pluralistic and
democratic. In its place, they seek to promote one that is closed,
vengeful, repressive and absolutist.To secure genuine victory, we
must make sure that they fail, not just in their assault on our safety
but also in their challenge to our most fundamental values (9).
Koh is stating that terrorists are trying to destroy our principles and beliefs
at our core.Watching the world stage play out one feels we may be losing
this war because we are shifting in our values.
After 9/11 our government began its war on terror.The problem
was understanding this new type of warfare.We were ill prepared from the
start.Those in charge of making the important decisions seem to have
mixed messages. Fear lead us, for the first time in our history, to initiate a
pre-emptive war.The facts that are coming out today sadly show that most
of the reasons given were fabricated intelligence and misrepresented facts.
As stated in “The Importance of Counterterrorism in the Twenty-First
Century,” an article by Peter Pawlick, and Chuck Goodwin,“Attempting
to connect Iraq with al-Qaeda and possession of weapons of mass destructions
(WMD), the Bush Administration initiated a pre-emptive war.To
date, no evidence has been found to support either claim” (2). This preemptive
war has cost not just lives, but for America, the things that made
us a country of high principle and honor.
The views that the rest of the world have about how we have
behaved after 9/11, give an idea of how fear drove the U.S to make poor
choices. Our closest allies have questions about those choices that we
made. The Week, in a paraphrase from the London Guardian, makes clear
how our country has lost its creditability.“Bush’s real legacy, though, is
how he eroded America’s principles.…..He’d like to be seen as a noble
patriot, but he ‘profoundly ill-served America’ by authorizing torture, setting
up secret prisons and an extra-legal gulag at Guantanamo Bay, and
abandoning ‘the rule of law.’The damage he did to America’s image abroad
will take a generation to repair”(5). One of the most important values that
we as a country gave the world was that after World War II, we created the
Geneva Conventions that protected prisoners of war from torture; now
fear has made us think it permissible to torture. If we continue our present
course we will have no real credibility in the rest of the world.We have
become hypocrites, in what we say and what we do.
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