Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and teaching assistant professor in the Department of History Dan Bolger discussed military intervention and conflicts in the Middle East on Thursday. The discussion, in Oxford debate form, took place in Park Shops and attracted an audience of about 150 from interdisciplinary backgrounds and interests.
The debate focused on the issue of identifying the enemy in the Middle East. A question that is being asked not only on college campuses in the United States, but also in Middle Eastern capital cities, around kitchen tables in North Carolina, and among young men and women in uniform, according to Bolger, who expanded on this by talking about the complexity of the history and multitude of factors at play.
“On the morning after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, with almost 3,000 dead on American soil, we thought we knew,” Bolger said. “It was Osama Bin Laden. It was the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. We’re gonna go get them, we’re gonna make them pay. Except we couldn’t find them, not exactly. Nine days after the planes hit the twin towers, the Pentagon and the field in Shanksville Pennsylvania, American President George W. Bush said that our enemy were Al-Qaeda and those who harbored or supported them.”
Bolger is a retired Army lieutenant general, and author of “Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.” He discussed his experience regarding answering questions about the region with Hagel, who served as Secretary of Defense under President Barack Obama’s administration from 2013 to 2015, as well as two terms in the United States Senate from 1997 to 2009. He also served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1968.
Hagel discussed the war in Iraq, and how Obama is sometimes criticized for abandoning the region too soon. According to him, this is factually incorrect, as it was Bush who signed an agreement with former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that all U.S. forces would withdraw from Iraq by 2011 as they were seen as an occupying force.
Since then, American-led intervention has continued in Iraq, and with it the political argument intensified and deepened. Hagel mentions the role the U.S. has played as a major influencer in the international community, and how it is a result of the expectations Americans have for themselves as nation, in both self-interest advancing and helping others.
“America had dominated the world, no country has even been close to America by any measure,” Hagel said. “By any metric that you apply or measurement of powerful nations economically and in every way, we dominated the world. What does that have to do with [the debate]? I think it has everything to do with it, because our expectations have been always, if you’re born after World War II, why can’t America fix that problem?”
Malak Helal, a freshman studying engineering, found the event interesting because of the community she grew up in.
“I wanted to know the answers from a real perspective not from a media perspective, because the media all over the world tells what’s in its advantage or interests,” Malak said. “As a Muslim girl who grew up in the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, it’s really cool to attend events such as this one. It widens my horizons, find answers some and see things from a different perspective, the other side’s perspective, not only the one I’m constructed to believe in.”
