President Bush marked the six-month anniversary of the end of major combat in Iraq Thursday, and UW-Eau Claire students and professors are voicing their opinions on the situation.

Sophomore Mike Babl, a math major, said he reads about Iraq when it’s apparent in the news.

“I was kind of leery of the fact they had weapons of mass destruction,” Babl said. More focus should have been placed upon humanitarian aid, he added.

Senior Rebecca Schumitsch, who said she still tries to keep up with the news in Iraq, agreed.

“My personal belief is that when we went in (to Iraq), it wasn’t really about the weapons,” the special education major said.

No WMDs have been found in Iraq. However, chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay issued the first interim report to Congress Oct. 2 saying Iraq never disarmed and never complied with U.N. inspectors.

Despite the fact that no WMDs have been found, Schumitsch said Saddam Hussein should not have been in power.

Selika Ducksworth-Lawton, associate professor of history and former employee of the Rand Corporation think tank, has two good friends over in Iraq serving in the military.

“Seven thousand Iraqi (civilian deaths) between February and today is fairly low,” she said.

She pointed to other conflicts – such as Vietnam and the first Gulf War – in which civilian casualties rose into the ten or hundreds of thousands in a short time.

Thursday night saw two more U.S. soldiers killed when they were lured into an ambush in Iraq.

Ducksworth-Lawton said this is largely the result of the troops following their orders to preserve Iraqi civilian life whenever possible.

A small slip of paper in her office lists five simple steps: Verbal warning; present weapons; warning shot; non-lethal shot; and lethal shot. This is the procedure the U.S. soldiers were following when they were killed.

She said she’d like to see a number of steps eliminated from the list in the current conflict with Iraq.

She pointed out you can’t distinguish a guerilla from a civilian, and said she wanted her friends in Iraq to return safely.

Overall, Ducksworth-Lawton said the campaign is going as well as it can. Mission creep – the original mission being altered to something the military wasn’t organized for – has changed the U.S. forces’ role from that of an occupying army to that of a nation-building army. She complimented the Army, saying its goal of preventing chaos has been successful.

The debate over whether U.S. forces should leave Iraq is somewhat pointless, she said. If they decided to leave now, full deployment would take six months.

“If you don’t like what’s going on, vote,” Ducksworth-Lawton said. To sit and whine you didn’t know about the issues doesn’t work, she said.

With the multiple ongoing and complex debates, one student expressed her frustrations.

“I think nobody really knows,” Schumitsch said. “I think that may be the problem.”

– The Associated Press contributed to this story.