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Judith
Miller
New York Times correspondent
Barnard College Commencement
May 20, 2003
Thirty-four
years ago, I was supposed to be sitting in this audience about
to graduate, as you are today.
I say: supposed to be…because I didn’t make it.
I was actually overseas at the University of Brussels in an
advanced economics course…a kind of forced exile.
I was overseas because of my opposition to an American war
– ancient history now, to many of you in this room who
know the war in Vietnam only through Barnard history courses,
and maybe movies or perhaps some talks with your parents…
I was very sure of how I felt then about the war in Vietnam.
I felt with every fiber of my being that it was wrong…That
it was a terrible mistake for the United States. And that
we, the American people, were being lied to. As part of the
nonviolent RESIST anti-war movement here at Barnard and Columbia,
I violated the law, several times, to advance my belief that
the war was morally and politically wrong. I encouraged people
to go to Canada or to go to jail rather than participate in
it; I helped draft resistors find alternatives to military
service; and I occupied the offices of Dow Chemical Company
in a building that Columbia then owned at Rockefeller Center
and then Fayerweather Hall in the wrenching strike of 1968,
a strike which divided this campus just as surely as the country
itself was divided.
I remain enormously proud of having done so.
Now, 34 years later, I almost had to miss THIS commencement
at Barnard because of another war – the war in Iraq,
from which I’ve just returned. For the past three months,
I have been part of the journalistic "chosen," or
"self-chosen" – one of more than 800 reporters
who were embedded with the American military – with a
new generation of soldiers, some of whose fathers served in
Vietnam. I was privileged to be the only reporter embedded
in a very special unit – the 75th Exploitation Task Force,
the men and women charged with hunting for Saddam Hussein’s
alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Returning from Baghdad, I have some very mixed feelings about
this war – some enormously positive, some negative, and
some just confused – both deeply puzzled and curious.
I DO know what I think about the mostly young soldiers with
whom I was embedded…though their mission was extraordinary,
they prided themselves on being "ordinary" soldiers
- "Ma’am," they would say, "I’m just
an ordinary soldier." But, of course, they were not ordinary
at all. I saw acts of sacrifice, discipline, courage, defiance,
and commitment on the part of the MET-ALPHA, the unit with
which I spent most of my time, and other members of the XTF,
that will stay with me for the rest of my life. My embed opened
up a world I knew nothing about. I met young men and women
whom I probably never would have met had it not been for the
war in Iraq.
As you know, most soldiers do not come from, or attend, colleges
like Barnard. In fact, many of them had joined the army straight
out of high school. When the war broke out, they were working
hard, some literally night and day, to earn degrees from colleges
so that their children would have advantages that many of
them did not have.
I also learned that you can cover the Pentagon, that vast
grey labyrinth of a building on the Potomac, for years without
ever knowing the army, much less the military. My embed taught
me a new language, "militarese" – with its
endless acronyms and inside jokes. I learned a new culture.
I went weeks without showers or real food. I ate MRE’s
– and learned that there is nothing that isn’t edible
when drenched in enough tobasco sauce. I shared the soldiers’
loneliness – missed births, children’s birthdays,
parents’ deaths. I watched them perform, day after day,
mostly without complaint, enduring conditions that most of
us can’t begin to imagine. The soldiers were there to
carry out "their mission," to do a job, and they
did it admirably, and in a way that made me proud to be among
them as an American.
Does one lose one’s journalistic "objectivity"
when one’s life vitally depends on such people? Probably.
Was it worth it? For me, definitely. But I believe that my
profession needs to conduct what the military calls an AAR,
an "after action report" on this embedding experience.
Journalists need to draw conclusions about whether journalistic
objectivity was compromised during the war; the military needs
to consider whether the strain of taking care of us, and protecting
us, and giving us dangerous information was an undue burden
on the military. We all need to debate whether the country’s
interests were best served by this arrangement.
This is but one of many questions I have about this war.
Another involves the circumstances under which the war started,
the justification our leaders gave for it, and its consequences
on the ground in the Middle East and for us at home, now that
the first phase of the war is over.
I have no doubt that deposing Saddam Hussein was a good thing
in Iraq. As the co-author of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis
in the Gulf, a book written months before the last Gulf
War in 1991, a war I also covered, I am on record as believing
that Saddam Hussein’s regime was among the most brutal
in the Middle East. I advocated his overthrow in my book then,
and everything that I saw on the ground in Iraq has reinforced
that view. Given what I have seen and experienced in the past
three months, I am deeply disturbed that our country did not
deliver Iraq from that tyrant’s hands in 1991 when we
first had the chance.
Saddam Hussein was truly a monster. His endless palaces were
juxtaposed by poverty I had seen only in the world’s
poorest Arab countries. And that poverty was not caused by
sanctions, as many would have you believe, but by his insistence
on stealing Iraq’s enormous oil wealth for himself and
his family while his people literally suffered and starved.
As my unit and I drove up through southern Iraq to Baghdad,
we saw first-hand how he had warped Iraqi society. Most impressive,
to me, was the extent to which Saddam had turned Iraq into
one large ammunition dump. I have never seen so many mortars,
rifles, RPG’s, empty and filled shells, army storage
facilities, military bases, torture centers, security headquarters,
in my life. Under Saddam, Iraq had literally become one large
military industrial complex.
Then were was the fear, the palpable fear people had before
they were certain he was gone – perhaps not dead –
but gone – and the sense of relief and joy they had afterwards.
Everywhere our Humvee went after the fall of Baghdad, we were
surrounded by laughing, smiling children and thumbs-up signs
from adults. "Stay with us," people yelled. "Keep
us safe," they said in Arabic and English. "Don’t
leave us again."
The Administration’s mishandling of the post-war security
situation also puzzles and depresses me. Iraqis were looking
to us – the American invaders – to protect them
after the war that we started. I fear we have failed to do
that, at least in the immediate aftermath of this war. The
widespread popular and targeted looting have angered Iraqis,
and made them question our commitment to them. Some now believe
Americans have only come for oil. Others fear greater imperial
designs. I hope that Jerry Bremer will succeed where his predecessors
failed. I hope that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, America
will show that we as a nation are capable of building. The
whole world knows that we can blow things up. The issue now
is whether we have the staying power to help people build
a better future for themselves and their children. Much will
depend on how the rest of the world answers that question,
and how well we fulfill our obligations to those whose world
we have entered and irrevocably changed.
I think there are other questions, too, that the Bush administration
will now have to answer: Will the weapons hunters find the
weapons of mass destruction programs that were cited repeatedly
as the major justification for the invasion? Could inspectors
have uncovered the dual use equipment that was hidden –
sometimes in plain sight – throughout the country without
a war? Were the concerns about anthrax clouds over our cities
exaggerations? Were they justified by what we knew then, as
opposed to what we know now? Was the intelligence that produced
them politically distorted? Were those who wanted to go to
war deceiving themselves about Saddam’s capabilities?
Was the war really necessary, not just for Iraq, but to protect
American national security?
When I return permanently home to the U.S., I will be among
those trying to find answers to these questions – questions
I wondered about so often in the field. Now I may have impressions,
but they are only that.
But as educated women graduating from one of the finest colleges
in the United States, I hope that you will demand answers
to these questions. I hope that you will not leap to conclusions
based on ideological tilt or political affiliation, but approach
the world you are entering with a permanent curiosity and
an open heart and mind.
Here at Barnard, you have been given the best preparation
possible for a world so full of such difficult questions.
The world I entered was pretty straightforward compared to
yours. I wish you well. I congratulate you on your graduation.
And I’m glad to have finally made it to a commencement
since I graduated in absentia. . .
Finally, I’m thrilled to be there with you today a little
late, sharing my questions with you. I have little advice.
Go out and create. Go out and thrive. Go out and always remain
curious.
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