Letters to the Editor

Another place for free textbooks

The article “Reaching for less expensive
textbooks”(Jan. 9) left out one great source for free
textbooks.

The Undergraduate Students Association Council’s Financial
Supports Commission’s Booklending Program offers free
textbooks that can be checked out for the entire quarter.

This is much more convenient than spending large amounts of cash
on textbooks or borrowing them from reserve stacks for two hours at
a time.

Also, this quarter the program is more efficient than ever.

Books are now computer-catalogued and checked out by simply
scanning students’ BruinCards.

The program is also in the middle of reorganizing books to make
them easier to find, and we are purchasing additional books to
cover more classes and meet the need for new editions.

Shaun Doria

Third year,

Neuroscience and political science

USAC Financial Supports

commissioner

Confederacy not enough for Iraq

David Lazar’s column “Iraqis can be unified through
separation” (Jan. 9) is a reflection of the frightening
divergence between our national debate over U.S. policy options in
Iraq and the reality of facts on the ground.

Lazar urges the U.S. to push for an Iraqi confederacy
recognizing relative autonomy along religious and ethnic lines.

When it comes to the practicality of dividing the country along
sectarian lines, Iraqi sects are not as regionally homogenous as
many take for granted.

Several of Iraq’s provinces actually have significant
ethnic minorities. Most Iraqis also live in urban areas where
sectarian divisions occur not across vast desert expanses but
rather from one neighborhood to the next, such as in Baghdad, Basra
and Kirkuk.

Lazar’s weakest justification for dividing the country is
that “Iraq as a nation is largely a fabrication” due to
its creation by British authorities from Ottoman provinces
post-World War I.

Yes, the political boundaries of modern Iraq are certainly
arbitrary, but on this basis, its national status is no more a
“fabrication” than the other states in the region that
were similarly created under the mandate system.

As in almost all of Africa, for example, arbitrary boundaries
take on real meaning over time for those who live within them.

In addition, to argue that Iraq has only been held together
because of Hussein’s brutality misses the point: Hussein
butchered people not simply to keep Iraq territorially intact, but
to ensure that he would continue to be the one ruling it.

Lazar continues by claiming that it is futile to “forge a
country from such fundamentally different groups such as Sunnis and
Shiites.”

This is a bizarre statement, particularly while Sunnis and
Shiites live side by side in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and other
countries. If anything, the devastation Hussein wrought on Iraqi
society prevented these groups from coming together in a healthy
polity.

Lazar seems to almost dismiss the grim nature of the current
intersectarian violence for which he purports to offer a
solution.

Rather than fulfilling the hope of mitigating the violence,
moving toward a confederal arrangement would only provide an
incentive for sectarian militias and death squads to step up their
campaign of ethnic cleansing in order to consolidate control over
their territory.

Advocating the creation of an Iraqi confederacy only intensifies
the tremendous obstacles to peace in Iraq.

Kyle Harris

Fourth year,

Political science and history