Students across Canada and the U.S. will be walking out of classes today in an International Day of Student Strike and Action against the looming war on Iraq.

Sophisticated commentators are sure to scold us as they did following the monumentalinternational protests of February 15, lamenting the “nasty smell of idealism gone sour” that emanates from “the dupes of tyrants” (John Sullivan, National Post),whose backward sentiments under “the guise of peace” can only be attributed to either “sheer wickedness or naïveté” (Barbara Amiel, London Telegraph).

Of course, it is not out of support for the brutal suffering that Saddam Hussein has caused that students will be walking out, nor even ignorance of it. The action comes out of a desire to stop our governments from worsening it. A confidential U.N. report leaked in January warns that “thirty per cent of children under five” — or 1.26 million children — “would be atrisk of death from malnutrition” in the event of waron Iraq, while “approximately ten million people …would be highly food insecure, displaced or directlyaffected by military action.”

Whatever the consequences of an attack, they will only add to thedevastation of a country that has suffered not just under its brutal dictator but also under the devastating policies of the United States. Under the U.S.-U.K.-spearheaded U.N. sanctions of the last decade, 500,000 Iraqi civilians have lost theirlives, taking the conservative estimates.

The high loss of Iraqi life since the Gulf War follows a lengthy period of comparable death and misery, when Iraq was a friendly client state of theU.S. It now well-known that the same atrocities invoked to justify a war against Saddamtoday were committed with U.S. support and aid in the eighties. In1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan dispatched special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad “with the explicit aim of fostering better relations between the UnitedStates and Iraq,” as John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard note in the January 2003 issue of Foreign Policy. Soonafter, “Saddam was gassing Kurds and Iranians,” all with U.S. co-operation and support. This support included “facilitat[ion] of Iraq’s efforts to developbiological weapons by allowing Baghdad to import disease-producing biological materials such as anthrax, West Nile virus, and botulinal toxin.”

The authors, two respected scholars well within the mainstream, invoke this background to illustrate the limited tactical point that Saddam can still be deterred today, as indicated by his selective instances of gassing innocents and attackingneighbours only when he could count on the support ofhis patron superpower. (Just before the Kuwait attack, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam: “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”)

Whatever threat Saddam Hussein may truly pose, attacking him is surely the best way of bringing it about. A CIA letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 8, leaked to the New York Times pointed out the same: “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short ofconducting terrorist attacks, [but] should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack couldno longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist action.”

But the growing opposition to war is not just motivated by concern for the grave immediate consequences of an attack on Iraq. There is an underlying resistance to accepting a world dominated by force and violence, in which stronger countriesimpose their will on the weak while neglecting crucial domestic problems. In this respect, the Bush administration, observes Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Anatol Lieven in the October 2002 London Review of Books,is following “the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism,” scaring the people into obedience with their extreme version of the standard elite assault on social well-being and justice.

It is not out of wickedness or naiveté thatmillions of people have organized to oppose thesetendencies. It is out of concern that their ominousimplications for the world will be realized. And thethousands of students that will be saying so inMontreal today — CEGEPs, francophone universities,and English universities — are but one part of anever-growing movement of people rallying around thisconcern. For us students, today’s strike is astatement of conscience; one that holds that we cannotgo about the studies that prepare us for our lives oftomorrow while our political leadership prepare todevastate the lives of so many today.