Students, faculty and community members crowded into Lecture Hall 8 Wednesday night for “The War in Iraq and its Consequences,” a Binghamton University history department teach-in. BU was one of over 40 colleges and universities nationwide to hold teach-ins this week, in conjunction with a campaign coordinated by Historians Against the War to raise increased awareness about Iraq in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 7 election.

The teach-in was led by four history professors. Professor Donald Quataert opened the evening with his speech “Iraq and its Neighbors,” which focused on how the war affects the region at large. Quataert said that, since the beginning of the war, about 1.6 million refugees have left Iraq. He also discussed the dangers of splitting Iraq into three sections based on ethnicities, an action he believes could lead to “increased tension or war with Turkey.”

Moving to a topic that hit closer to home, Professor Kathryn Kish Sklar gave a speech titled “Why the U.S. Military Budget Is So High.” Our nation conducts foreign policy based on domestic concerns, she said, and she called the U.S. military budget “a substitute for central economic planning … [that is] tremendously wasteful, chaotic and ultimately self-defeating.” She showed that between 2003 and 2005, the U.S. military budget — even at its lowest of around $300 billion — was still larger than the next 14 highest countries’ budgets combined.

Professor Thomas Dublin’s speech, “How the U.S. Got In, and What It Means,” called for an “examination of the justifications our government offered … when [it] went before the United Nations to make the case for war in Iraq.” He noted that the three major reasons — that Iraq refused to cooperate with U.N. inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction, had WMDs in contradiction to U.N. resolutions and continued to work with terrorists both nationally and internationally — were almost all wrong. Over time, Dublin said, it became clear that the CIA knew beforehand that these explanations were debatable, but, “the Bush administration brushed this aside in a rush to justify their intended course of action.”

It’s a course that has led many Americans to advocate for the war’s end. In “The Case for Withdrawal,” Professor Herbert Bix’s speech, Bix said that “the majority of Americans are now ready to do the right thing, but our … party systems make it hard.”

Bix argued that in addition to withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan and Iraq within six months, the United States should close all bases in Central Asia and dismantle its presence at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “These moves,” he said, “should be accompanied by generous reparations to whatever governments eventually emerge in Iraq and Afghanistan … at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars.”