They approached the question from different angles and disciplinary perspectives, but they all arrived at the same final, emphatic point: Going to war with Iraq now, given the lack of solid evidence and international support, would be a costly mistake.

The Sept. 25 teach-in, "Should the United States Attack Iraq?" was sponsored by the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense and the University's General Alumni Association. Richard H. Kohn, professor of history and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense, served as both moderator and panelist.

Douglas Dibbert, president of the alumni association, drew laughter from audience members when he reminded them of what Chancellor James Moeser had said last fall - "that the University of North Carolina does not have a foreign policy." What it did have this one night, though, was unanimity on one vital foreign policy question.

Kohn described the policy announced by the White House in late September as a radically new national security policy that calls for pre-emptive strikes against perceived but not proven threats.

"The United States, the Middle East and perhaps the entire international community stand on the brink of what might be an historic shift in norms and behaviors," he said.

A. Mark Weisburd, professor in the School of Law and an expert on international law, said such a pre-emptive strike would be illegal under international law without approval from the Security Council of the United Nations. The joint resolution authorizing military action that President George W. Bush has asked the U.S. Congress to pass would set out the administration's justifications for an attack. On Oct. 2, the House approved a resolution that authorizes the use of military force against Iraq. As of Oct. 7, the U.S. Senate had not reached agreement over the wording of the text for such a resolution.

Weisburd said there is no doubt that Iraq has ignored Security Council resolutions, but it does not follow that the United States has a legal right to unilaterally attack Iraq because of those violations.

Weisburd said the self-defense argument contained in the resolution seems shaky as well because of the lack of evidence of Iraq's capability or willingness to attack the United States. "This doesn't mean that you have to let the other guy get in the first punch, but it does require some solid reason to believe that you are about to be punched."

Douglas MacLean, a professor of philosophy who is an expert in just war theory, said the war would be immoral as well as illegal, for many of the same reasons that Weisburd cited.

"Globalization and the existence of an international legal order and multinational institutions change the assumptions of sovereignty and what a nation can do on its own and the means short of war that can be employed in response to hostile actions," MacLean said.

"The law of the land, which expresses our fundamental values, also includes our being bound by treaties that we enter into. The U.N. charter is a treaty and it thus legally, and I would argue morally, constrains what a president can do."

MacLean further argued that it is essential that the causes of going to war, and the conduct of war, be constrained by moral principles. "Abiding by moral constraints is the only thing that distinguishes a just war from naked aggression, or the noble warrior from the barbarian," MacLean said. "These principles are central to using force while maintaining civil society."

Kohn and Mark J.C. Crescenzi, assistant professor of political science, who teaches courses in international conflict, both argued that Saddam Hussein, as bad as he is, remains fundamentally deterrable.

"We learned this in the Persian Gulf War, when even in the heat of war, Saddam Hussein elected not to use chemical and biological weapons that we knew he had," Crescenzi said. "He did not use them against Israeli populations or against U.S. troops. If that were the case during the heat of war, then logically it would hold that would probably be the case at a time of relative peace. And so the fundamental direct threat isn't there."

Moreover, Crescenzi said, Hussein is a dictator interested above all else in staying alive and staying in power. Given those desires, Hussein is most likely to use the weapons he has at his disposal against the United States only if he is under attack by the United States and in a position to conclude all else was lost.

No logic -- or evidence -- for attack
Kohn said that if the United States could produce evidence that Hussein would soon possess nuclear weapons, and if there were persuasive logic that Iraq were interested in using them to attack the United States rather than defend itself from an attack, then the argument for a pre-emptive strike would be sound. But there is no such evidence -- or logic.

"In fact, logic dictates just the opposite," Kohn said. "Why would Saddam use the weapons against us when he knows that would be suicidal? Why would he give them to terrorists when he knows their use of the weapons would be an immediate excuse for the United States to take him out whether he left fingerprints on those weapons or not? What possible use are such weapons to Iraq except as a deterrent against us attacking him?"

Kohn further argued that if the United States takes action against Iraq without winning authorization from the United Nations, it would risk being judged as "the pariah of the international community and the very rogue state that our enemies accuse us of being."

Sarah Shields, an associate professor of history whose specialties include Islamic civilization, predicted a war with Iraq would wreak devastating destruction not only on the people of Iraq but on its ancient cities such as Baghdad that are incredibly important throughout the Muslim and Arab world.

Shields rejected the suggestion that the war in Afghanistan can be seen as a model of what can be done to liberate a people from an oppressive regime. "For me what it shows is that the individual targets that we seek we may not find," Shields said. "And the prospect of Saddam Hussein missing in action and potentially anywhere is frightening."

The war in Afghanistan also has shown that any new regime would be unpredictable, insecure and very likely short-lived. The war also has shown that even the most precise weapons can inflict thousands of casualties.

Once a war with Iraq were won, the United States would need to be prepared to commit as many as 50,000 soldiers to maintain the peace inside Iraq among warring factions that would include the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to the central part of Iraq that had been in Hussein's firm control. The danger exists that Iraq could dissolve into three "statelets," she said.

"I agree with Dick Kohn that anti-American sentiment will grow and continue to grow in the region if the United States invades Iraq," Shields said.

Part of the problem of U.S. intervention is the record it already has amassed in the Middle East over the past half century, Shields said. That record contradicts current rhetoric about the goals of creating a higher moral order of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, she said.

The United States, for instance, helped to overthrow a popularly elected regime in Iraq in 1953. In 1963, the United States again intervened by helping a new regime overthrow a Communist government in Iraq. Among the regime that took power from the Communists was Saddam Hussein.

The United States also supported the Shah of Iran from 1953 until he was overthrown in 1979, despite his horrific record of human rights violations. And there is the United States' staunch support of Israel and President Bush's description of Ariel Sharon as a man of the people despite the various massacres Sharon has been involved in during his long military and political career, Shields said.

Carl Ernst, professor of religious studies, agreed with Shields that the United States' support for Israel and its history of support for dictators, including Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran in the 1980s, has left a lingering memory throughout the Arab world.

"For all these reasons, a U.S. declaration of war against Iraq will be seen as a unilateral declaration of an imperial will, if it flouts the rule of law and if it stands aside from the United Nations and the Security Council," Ernst said.

And even if the United Nations supports the U.S. resolutions as a justification for war, suspicion will remain because the United States has expressed no interest in seeing enforced any of the U.N. resolutions concerning Israel.

'A colossal intellectual error'
Ernst also debunked the theory of a clash of civilizations between something called Western civilization that is poised in a life-and-death struggle against Islamic civilization.

There hasn't been a separate Muslim world for at least a couple hundred years, Ernst said, thanks to the legacy of colonialism out of which about 90 percent of all Muslim countries were militarily conquered.

The clash-of-civilization argument is flawed because it seeks to portray entire populations of a huge number of people as being motivated by religion exclusively, without regard to other powerful influences such as economic class, ethnicity, local history, language and city-versus-rural differences.

"We have a notion that is very easily expressed that there is a Muslim mentality, there is uniformity of thought, that everything somehow has to do with religion so we don't need to address all these other issues," Ernst said. "It is a simple solution, but it is a colossal intellectual error."

In this regard, Ernst cited the phrase in a National Security policy that was aired (the week before) by the White House that talked about "a struggle for the future of the Muslim world."

"If this policy is enacted in the form of unilateral declarations of war, it will be seen as a war against Islam and Muslims," Ernst said. "It would be throwing fuel on the fire of the most extreme perspectives in Muslim-majority countries, and I'm afraid it would create a situation of much greater insecurity than we can imagine at the present time."

Michael Hunt, Everett H. Emerson professor of history, writes and teaches in the general field of international history and addressed the broader implications for American foreign relations.

"Iraq has helped to raise the broader question of what course the United States should follow in world affairs, what vision axiom or even assumptions should serve as the national compass now and in the years ahead," he said.

Hunt said that the policy that has emerged is an outgrowth of thinking among leading figures in the Bush administration, including Vice President Richard Cheney, that began to emerge following the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.

That thinking, Hunt said, is one that seeks to position the United States, as the only superpower left standing in a post-Cold War world, as the guarantor of order and stability and the champion of progressive values.

But rather than being a radical shift in foreign policy as Kohn and others suggested, Hunt postulated that it could be viewed as a "logical extension" of the Monroe Doctrine to the rest of the world.

The doctrine, when it was established in 1823, remained toothless and largely defensive until the 1890s when the United States began to assert it in the Caribbean. Throughout the 20th century, the doctrine was extended to Western Europe and the Middle East and the Western Pacific.

A global Monroe Doctrine
Hunt argued that this go-it-alone approach as the lone superpower serves to create more insecurity, not less, because it arouses the very kind of resentment and distrust and hatred that in the long run would make America more vulnerable.

At the same time, Hunt said, he believes that President Bush's foreign policy is motivated and informed by a deep moral sense to protect this country and the rest of the civilized world from destruction.

American security, and prosperity, Hunt argued, may in the final analysis depend more heavily on the kind of global interconnections that the Bush administration at various times has often seemed too reluctant to make.

And the notion of counter-proliferation, meant to leave weapons of mass destruction only in the hands of the United States, may motivate others to move more quickly to obtain such weapons in order to protect themselves from U.S. policy, Hunt said.

"The Bush administration has the right to use Iraq to ask us to think about how the United States should relate to the world," Hunt said. "I would suggest, as an historian, that the Bush doctrine with narrow security precautions has one and only one choice and it may not be the course that is most likely to leave us better off."

While all the other panelists focused on risk factors tied to religion and history and law, James A. Stimson, the Raymond Dawson professor of political science, explored whether the possibility of going to war with Iraq could be understood as a political ploy by the Bush administration. Stimson said he is confident no president in history has been cynical enough to go to war for domestic political reasons.

"We can say that the right in American politics was sure that Bill Clinton's every act abroad could be explained by cynical calculation of personal gain," Stimson said. "The left is ready to believe the same about George W. Bush clearly, and the explanation is probably too pat in both cases."

What is just as certain to Stimson is that if a war comes, the American public will support it because public opinion about foreign policy is driven almost entirely by political and media elites. And a simple rule of public opinion is that when the public hears only one message, it believes it, Stimson said.

"That means that when the first bomb falls the press will go into cheerleader mode, the Democrats will praise the courage and skill of the American armed forces, and all -- absolutely all public commentary -- will support the war," Stimson said.

"On the morning after the war begins, American public opinion will be virtually unanimous in support of it. And because the war and the quality of national leadership are inseparable, George W. Bush will be lionized as a great, decisive president."

Nevertheless, the public harbors real doubts about all presidents and their character, their wisdom, their capacity to do what has to be done. Those doubts never go away, it just becomes inappropriate to express them at times of war. But those doubts quickly return, along with the attacks from the opposing party.

"The absence of opposition is not genuine support -- it's the calculated act of political leaders who understand it is not propitious to question the chief when the nation is in a patriotic fervor," Stimson said.

Real wars are ugly and filled with problems. They have real costs. And those costs -- including the array of domestic concerns left unattended -- can eventually drag down the popularity of a president almost as quickly as the start of a war can raise it, Stimson said.

That is essentially the story of the presidential father who found himself the most popular president of all time in January 1991 -- and out of office two years later.