2008 Woodie Awards
March letter from the editor
Haley Swenson
Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: News/Features
Since 2004, Orbis has included an updated total of U.S. military deaths that have occurred since the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 on the second page of each issue. Though I was not present when the decision to run this regular feature was made, it is something I have continued as editor this year for a variety of reasons. We can't report on Iraq and the repercussions of the war in every issue, but including that number ensures that when anyone picks up our paper, or for that matter, during every production weekend as a staff, we are all forced at least for a moment to remember there is a war taking place, which continues to take lives, even as we continue to live our lives in the U.S. virtually unaffected by the violence.
Early this year, Orbis staffer Tyler Zimmer recommended we begin including a tally of Iraqi lives lost since the invasion as well. I told him my only concern with this was how impossible it seems to find any consensus on those numbers. Current estimates range from as low as 100,000 to over a million. Five years of violence in Iraq have been tragic, not just because we've lost nearly 4,000 U.S. lives, but because we've lost so many human lives. And the consequences of the war don't just end at loss of life. Five years later, misunderstandings, oversimplifications and an "us" and "them" mentality continue to dominate much of our discourse on Iraq. This year's IMPACT Symposium brought our campus' attention back to the war in Iraq, and in this issue, inspired by and sometimes upset by those speeches, several Orbis writers examine some of the continuing political and social fallout of the war.
Early this year, Orbis staffer Tyler Zimmer recommended we begin including a tally of Iraqi lives lost since the invasion as well. I told him my only concern with this was how impossible it seems to find any consensus on those numbers. Current estimates range from as low as 100,000 to over a million. Five years of violence in Iraq have been tragic, not just because we've lost nearly 4,000 U.S. lives, but because we've lost so many human lives. And the consequences of the war don't just end at loss of life. Five years later, misunderstandings, oversimplifications and an "us" and "them" mentality continue to dominate much of our discourse on Iraq. This year's IMPACT Symposium brought our campus' attention back to the war in Iraq, and in this issue, inspired by and sometimes upset by those speeches, several Orbis writers examine some of the continuing political and social fallout of the war.
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