Clark talks about Iraq:
The Clark community focuses on understanding the complexities of war in today's world
By Judith Jaeger Photos by Tammy Woodard M.A. '98
War is a deft and unforgiving sculptor. It shapes things—people, families, cultures and nations.
At Clark, the war in Iraq has shaped the 2005-06 academic year through campuswide conversations about the war and its causes and consequences. Dean of the College Doug Little started these conversations at Fall Convocation ceremonies with his keynote address, "Over Here: Why We Need to Talk about Iraq." Little explained the reasons for initiating the year-long discussion.
"This decision reflects the confluence of two things—an ongoing commitment to creating a strong sense of intellectual community at Clark and a growing conviction that most Americans are paying too little attention to the war in Iraq," Little said. "At a time when the airwaves seem to be dominated by stories about Natalee Holloway, Michael Jackson and Olivia Newton John's boyfriend, nearly 2,000 Americans and at least 20,000 Iraqis have died over there in a war that few of us over here understand."
With Clark's interdisciplinary strengths and its emphasis on seeking solutions to real-world problems, it's not difficult to find faculty who are willing to apply their areas of expertise to discussions about the war. The following are just a few of the Clark faculty whose research will likely impact the way we understand issues related to war and its aftermath.
The United States and the Middle East
In addition to his keynote address at Convocation, Little gave a talk this fall on "Everything You Wanted to Know about U.S. Policy in Iraq but were Afraid to Ask." Little studies and teaches American diplomatic history. His most recent book, "American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945," published in 2003, focuses on the complex, sometimes inconsistent attitudes and interests that have shaped U.S. relations in the region.
"In some ways the American approach to the Middle East is still frozen in the Cold War era," Little says. The relationship between the United States and the Middle East during that period rested on three key factors, he explains: oil and American dependence on oil, the special relationship between the United States and Israel, and keeping the Soviets out of the region.
A key missing factor was an understanding of Arab states. In the past, Little says, U.S. officials identified Arabs as "Arabs we could work with and who aspired to the same things we do, or the Arabs who aren't like us." From 1945 to 1975, he adds, the United States also lacked an understanding of Islam. U.S. officials liked Islam's spiritualism, because it was antithetical to communism and would therefore help keep the Soviets out of the region. But they were also troubled that Islam hadn't undergone a reformation.
"There's a sense that Islam is a backward looking religion," Little says. "It's really a stereotype of Islam that's not accurate."
Without an understanding of Islam that moved beyond stereotypes, he says, U.S. officials were never able to understand "what makes Arabs tick." Little adds that U.S. officials still don't have a good understanding of Islam or Iraq's history, particularly the implications of the way the British assembled the country in 1921 as a patchwork of former Mesopotamian states with vastly different cultures and religions. These key failures of understanding, Little believes, are at the root of the challenges the United States has faced during and after the Iraq war.
"There was a failure to understand that the people there aren't just like us and it just might not work."
Little is among those who believe there is no easy way out of Iraq for the United States. And that's what motivated him to bring the Clark community together around this topic.
"It's a cliché to say knowledge is power, but by knowing more, we as a community at Clark and the country at large can help the Bush administration find a way out."
Exporting democracy
The war that started out as a pre-emptive strike against a country suspected of having weapons of mass destruction evolved into an action to deliver democracy to Iraq. This raises questions about what it takes for a nation to successfully develop a democratic society.
Paul Posner, a professor in the Government and International Relations Department, studies just these issues. His current research focuses on democratization and political participation in developing regions, particularly Latin America. Most recently, he has been studying Chile's new democracy from the return of democracy there in 1990 to the present. The restoration of democracy in Chile began with substantial public demonstrations against Augusto Pinochet in 1983. The United States bolstered these efforts by consulting with the opposition groups, training leaders of nongovernmental organizations working on the ground and supporting the media. Posner adds that when Pinochet tried to manipulate the results of the election in 1988, the United States convinced him that such manipulation would not be tolerated.
Iraq's transition to democracy has been different, he notes.
"For any social scientist looking at countries in which to establish democracy, Iraq would not be anywhere near the top of the list," Posner says. "Iraq was a very poor choice."
In dissecting the case of Chile, Posner identifies factors essential for a successful transition to democracy. One factor is a strong set of state institutions, which Chile had before Pinochet came to power. In this sense, Posner says, Iraq looked like a good candidate for democracy. But it lacked another important factor: citizenship, or more specifically an understanding that the state protects the rights of its citizens and the state will intervene on the individual's behalf through agreed-upon processes. This ensures that conflicts can be managed without violence, Posner notes, which gives societies the social stability necessary for a transition to democracy.
Nationalism and a respect for the rule of law also play a role. Posner cites post-World War II Germany and Japan as examples in which these two factors helped the successful establishment of democracy. By contrast, Posner says Iraq not only lacks a national identity among its citizens, but is divided along significant ethnic and religious cleavages.
"What we see now is the eruption of conflicts between social groups who had been kept in check by Saddam Hussein's strong arm," he says, referring to the postwar insurgent violence.
While Posner is dubious about the possibility of establishing democracy in Iraq, he does support the exporting of democracy in general.
"I'm not against the U.S. government trying to promote democracy throughout the globe. I just think we need to examine the existing factors first."
According to Posner, a more effective approach would be for the United States to work with groups that are demanding democratic rights and freedoms in countries where some of the elements of democratic society already exist. It worked in Chile and other countries and, he believes, it can also work in the Middle East.
"Egypt is a much better candidate for democracy in the Middle East," says Posner, noting the substantial support for democratic society in Egypt and its interest in remaining a U.S. ally.
International cooperation
From the start of the war, international cooperation has been the subject of much debate. Public discussion in the United States about this issue has focused primarily on countries that are contributing to the military effort. But there is an economic dimension to international cooperation as well, says Srinivasan Sitaraman, a faculty member in the Government and International Relations Department who teaches a course on the subject. With the global economy, Sitaraman says international cooperation is happening all over the world, but it requires two elements.
"Cooperation is always a function of mutual gains—will you get back what you put in?" he says. "It is also predicated on peace." According to Sitaraman, the period of least international cooperation was between the first and second World Wars, because the wars disrupted trade.
"Right now, you're unlikely to find businesses willing to invest in countries that are unstable," he explains. For example, Sitaraman expects investors to pull away from Indonesia because of the Bali bombings in October 2002. International businesses and governments don't invest in sub-Saharan Africa either, he says, because there are too many impediments, such as power outages, to resources that support international trade.
Sitaraman is interested in Iraq because it is rich in oil resources and economic opportunity, and yet not much international cooperation is occurring there. There is the Coalition of the Willing, he says, but ongoing violence remains a major obstacle to international cooperation in Iraq on the economic development front.
"Many countries are concerned about the safety of their personnel," Sitaraman says. The United Nations has been tepid about entering Iraq after the bombing of the U.N. envoy in August 2003, he notes, and aid agencies remain wary of the violence. Sitaraman adds that the World Bank has pledged to help the effort in Iraq, but is also less than enthusiastic about entering the country. The violence has not only caused security problems, but also has disturbed basic infrastructure. He notes that in mid-October 2005, electricity, water and sewer still had not been restored to parts of the country.
Sitaraman suspects that the lack of a U.N. endorsement of the war and the lack of support for the war from some European nations has hindered cooperation as well. However, he also sees great potential for cooperation in Iraq.
"If things stabilize, and there's any stability over time, all of these players will rush into Iraq," he says. "It's just a matter of getting the politics right and some stability."
Achieving that stability will be difficult, Sitaraman says, because terrorism is difficult to fight. But he does see progress, especially with the ratification of Iraq's constitution in October 2005 and the recent elections there. He adds that Iraq doesn't need to look far for an example of international cooperation that's working in the Middle East. The United Nations, NATO, nongovernmental organizations, the World Bank and foreign governments are all working on initiatives in Afghanistan.
"Things have actually gone fairly well there—not perfectly, but you would still take the current situation over the Taliban government," he says.
Demographics and demonstrations
Wars also prompt an examination of dynamics on the home front. In a course on Power, Class and Status, for example, sociologist Robert Ross discusses the demographics of the U.S. military with his students.
"The military, and especially the Army, is the most integrated institution in our society," Ross says. The racial make up of the officer corps mimics the demographics of society exactly, he explains, but among the enlisted, the percentage of African Americans doubles. Ross believes this is because the military is a place where people whose opportunities are otherwise blocked in the rest of society can receive a fair shake.
"For people from less affluent backgrounds, the Army offers an interesting proposition: the opportunity for training and something more, such as a college education."
Yet, over the past couple of years, the army has had trouble meeting recruitment goals. Ross believes this is the result of two factors. First, the war in Iraq started as the economic recession was fading. More people had jobs and, as a result, weren't turning to the military as a career opportunity. Second, the use of reservists and national guard troops has created an ethical quandary. People who had enlisted in the reserves and the guard to aid in local action for short periods of time are on long deployments overseas. He believes this is discouraging people from enlisting as well.
You can't talk with Ross about war-related issues without also talking about antiwar movements. Ross is a longtime social activist whose current research is helping to keep sweatshop labor in the public eye. He was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Established in 1960, SDS is most widely known for its role in leading student opposition to the Vietnam War.
Ross notes that the opposition movements to both the Vietnam and Iraq wars were driven by very young people. But the similarities end there. For instance, Ross notes that the size of the opposition is larger now than it was in the 1960s.
"We're two years into the exercise and the majority of Americans are already against it," he says. "In Vietnam, it took seven years for Johnson to lose the majority in public opinion polls."
The language of the current opposition movement is less revolutionary, Ross adds, and it's not widely covered by the media. He points to the lack of media coverage of a demonstration in early October 2005 that brought 200,000 to 300,000 war protesters to Washington, D.C. He contrasts this to the 100,000 protesters who marched on Washington near the end of the Vietnam War. Ross suspects the media won't pay attention to the current antiwar movement until there's some kind of violence—this generation's Kent State.
"I hope I'm wrong about that, but it's a viable hypothesis."
But the key difference, Ross says, is the structure of student and nonstudent opposition to the Iraq war. In the 1960s, he explains, there were a few large student organizations running the movement, and each college and university campus was a rallying point. Likewise, adults had their own constituency groups, such as Women Strike for Peace.
"These organizations were required because they shouldered the cost of communication."
Today, Ross says, United Students Against Sweatshops is the largest among a very small number of small national student activist groups. The culprit behind this shift: E-mail. With the ability to send a message to thousands at the push of a button, Ross says, there is no longer a need for a structured organization to handle communication. The gain is great, but so is the loss.
"There are fewer arenas in which to make strategic choices," Ross says. "There's no accountability. There is only voting with your feet, but little internal social movement debate about priorities."
The role of the media
The news, whether in print or on television, plays a large role in how and what we think about a war.
Or not, says Tim Shary, director of Clark's Screen Studies Program.
"Why does the average person know more about Paris Hilton than Osama Bin Laden," Shary would like to know. It's the kind of question he likes to debate with students in his course on the History of Broadcasting. Part of the answer rests in the way war reporting changed after Vietnam, he says.
"The Vietnam War taught the military to do what it could to suppress information."
News about such incidents as the My Lai massacre and the Pentagon Papers spread through newspapers and television, Shary explains, before the military could catch up with it. But by the first Gulf War in 1991, he notes, the military had learned its lesson well.
It released information about only the most successful bombing missions and ground attacks, Shary cites as an example, without mentioning the number of Iraqis killed in these missions. And the press, he says, doesn't question this information from the military very much anymore.
"Journalism is supposed to be not only reporting what is found, but also investigating and questioning what is found," Shary says. "The news media seem to have telling as their main task. But they can also serve the public well by asking."
Shary understands his dissatisfaction with the war coverage over the past two years as a symptom of an overall deterioration of journalism. He looks back to the 1940s and the Fairness Doctrine, which established the practice in broadcasting that if a controversial view is presented then the other side of the issue must also be shown. The Reagan Administration dismantled the Fairness Doctrine, Shary says, and with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Clinton Administration made it easier for media outlets to merge. Not only does this give viewers fewer choices, but it also ties the news media more closely to corporate interests than to the public interest. The same corporations that own newspapers and television stations, Shary notes, also own professional sports teams and film companies.
"The media is much more about profits than seeking the truth."
But he's hopeful that the war in Iraq and catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina will bring about positive change in the news media.
"It's usually war and tragedy that bring about the largest changes in communication." After the Titanic sank, Shary adds, every ship with more than 50 passengers was required to communicate by radio.
Women and the war
What interests Research Professor Cynthia Enloe most about war are the people, particularly the women, it affects. And she's not alone. During the fall semester, Enloe gave more than 20 talks about women and the war in Iraq at colleges and universities across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
"This is a testimony to a genuine desire among students, faculty and the general public to think more deeply about what this war is doing not only to Iraqi society, but also to American society," Enloe says.
During the last few years, she has been following 12 to 13 women in the United States and Iraq to learn how the war is impacting their lives. Every time she gives a talk about the war, she discusses two women from each country. One woman Enloe has been following is the wife of a National Guard soldier who was deployed to Iraq. This American woman interests Enloe because the Pentagon expected her to be a counselor to the families of the Guard troops her husband was commanding. The Pentagon has been doing this for about 20 years, Enloe says, urging soldiers' wives to think of themselves as an arm of the military.
Enloe is also following an American Latina woman with one son in the military and another son about to graduate from high school. She's not sure she wants the other son to enlist.
"This woman's not a foreign policy expert, but she makes the government very nervous," Enloe says. "Governments are nervous about mothers, especially when women organize as mothers against a government policy."
For evidence of this, Enloe notes new ads for the U.S. military that were airing in October 2005. The ads were carefully placed during shows like re-runs of "Judging Amy," she explains, and were aimed at convincing mothers "that enlisting is good for their mothering of their children." Enloe also points to polls that show that American mothers of teenagers have become increasingly questioning of the war in Iraq.
Enloe talks about Nimo, a middle-aged Iraqi woman who runs a small beauty parlor in Baghdad. A war reporter sat in the beauty parlor for several hours and listened to conversations in the shop. Enloe was intrigued by the topics of their discussion: the abductions of young girls for ransom, violence and specifically violence against women, and how the local police, trained by the United States, didn't feel responsible for stopping this violence. Enloe also talks about Hannah Edwar, who is active in the Iraqi Women's Network, which protested Iraq's draft constitution this summer. For Enloe, the women in Nimo's beauty parlor and Edwar's activism highlight an important point about the U.S. military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We should never assume that women in other countries are passive, just waiting for another country to liberate them. They are organized and have their own ideas. We can support them, but we are not other women's liberators."
The way Enloe discusses Iraq reflects her interdisciplinary approach to her research and scholarship. She looks at issues from the perspectives of both a political scientist and a women's studies scholar, and sometimes as a geographer. The complexities of war require an interdisciplinary approach, Enloe says, and that makes Clark the perfect place for tryingto unravel the tangles of war.
"One of the things you learn at Clark is the absolute joy of plunging into complexity," she says.
Is the Patriot Act patriotic?
Clark marked Constitution Day—a new federal mandate—in September with a talk by Mark Miller, chair of the Government and International Relations Department, who spoke on "Is the Patriot Act Patriotic? Civil Liberties in the Wake of 9/11 and the War in Iraq." Miller's talk was also part of the series of campuswide discussions about the Iraq war.
The USA Patriot Act, which is short for the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, was signed into law in October 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It enhances the authority of U.S. law enforcement for the purpose of fighting terrorism against the United States and around the world. The Patriot Act amends immigration laws, banking and money laundering laws and foreign intelligence laws, among others. The act has been controversial since its inception because certain provisions have the potential to infringe on civil liberties.
Parts of the Patriot Act are fine, Miller says, but other parts do harm civil liberties. For instance, in his talk, Miller discussed how the act allows federal officials to search business, financial, medical, hotel, library and other records without obtaining a search warrant. Another provision he discussed is the secret court in Washington, D.C. that can also issue search warrants and, in some cases, never notify the target of those searches.
"There needs to be a check for potential abuses by law enforcement officials, and judges are the best defense we have against those abuses," Miller says. "I, of course, worry about abuses that the FBI committed during the civil rights era, the women's rights era and the Vietnam era."
But the real question for Miller isn't whether the Patriot Act infringes too much on civil liberties, but whether the act is serving its intended purpose of protecting the country from terrorism.
"It's very difficult to fight terrorism, and the Patriot Act is a way for the government to say ‘we're doing something,' when in fact we should be training better law-enforcement officers."
"The Politics of Truth"
Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV delivered the first President's Lecture for fall 2005 as part of Clark's campuswide discussion of the war in Iraq. Wilson spoke on Oct. 17 to a standing-room-only crowd in Daniels Theater in Atwood Hall.
Wilson has been at the center of a major political storm involving the White House, the CIA and the Iraq war.
"I can assure you that being out of Washington this week is a good thing," Wilson said, referring to the Grand Jury proceedings unfolding that same week in Washington, D.C.
In 2002, Wilson was assigned by the CIA to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger for the purpose of advancing his nuclear program. When his investigation turned up nothing, Wilson reported back to officials that there was no basis for the claims. When President Bush repeated the claim, most famously in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the Bush administration had exaggerated the public case for invading Iraq. Soon after, the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie (Plame) Wilson, as a clandestine CIA operative was leaked to the press. The conservative columnist Robert Novak published the information, inciting an ongoing investigation into the possibly illegal intelligence leak. Since Wilson's talk, the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, has been indicted on felony counts of perjury and obstructing justice.
In his address, Wilson discussed his vast experience as a foreign ambassador, the first and second Iraq wars and the events that led up to the leak of his wife's identity. He described his repeated efforts to correct the error in the 2003 State of the Union address. The op-ed in the New York Times, Wilson said, was a last-ditch attempt to get the White House to correct the record. The outing of his wife, he believes, was an attempt by the Bush administration to silence other potential critics of the intelligence that was used to make the case for war.
Since the leak of his wife's identity, Wilson has been speaking to audiences across the country.
"For the last two-and-a-half years, I've traveled this country, and what I have found is a population genuinely concerned about the direction we're headed in and what they can do about it," Wilson said. His advice to the audience at Clark was to embrace the foundation of democracy.
"The only way we can keep this republic is to hold this government to account for what it says and does in the name of the American people," he said. "The other side stands up. We, as Americans, need to stand up, too."
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