Author: Martin Kramer

Saddam in Court: Who’s on Trial?

On By Martin Kramer

With Saddam in U.S. hands, thoughts turn to his future trial. Various pundits have claimed that it won’t be enough to examine Saddam’s crimes. It will also be necessary to probe U.S. and Western support for his regime, during the decade of the Iran-Iraq war and the lead-up to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The late Elie Kedourie, historian and political theorist at the London School of Economics, put the issue in just the right perspective, in an interview granted in June 1992. (This was less than three weeks before his untimely passing.) Kedourie, it will be recalled, was a native of Baghdad, and an acute observer of Iraq’s troubled history. The interviewer told him that a Paris-based scholar had declared Saddam to be a “creature of the West.” Kedourie’s reply:

I do not understand what he means by that. If he means that it was Western governments that put him in power, then that is not true. If he means that from 1980 to 1990 the American and French governments and German firms did their best to help him, this is perfectly true. But you have to look at what their intentions were….The Americans believed, mistakenly I think, that if they did not do something in order to stop Khomeini, he would sweep over the whole of the Middle East. I think there was little prospect of that, but that is what they believed and therefore they chose to support Saddam. Again, within its own terms it was a rational if mistaken calculation. It was a terrible mistake, which lay at the back of the invasion of Kuwait and the war that followed, which I consider an unnecessary war. It was the result of policies that the Americans had followed vis-à-vis Saddam for ten years and that made him think that he could invade Kuwait with impunity.

A calculation went wrong. But I do not think that there was anything else there. Saddam is not a creature of the West. He is not a creature of anybody.

There are two crucial points here. First, Kedourie knew far too much about Iraq to regard Saddam as the West’s creation. He understood precisely which tectonic forces, by their immense internal pressures, had combined to produce him.

Second, Kedourie did not rail against the United States for its best-guess policies of the 1980s. He regarded the U.S. decision to back Saddam against Iran as a mistake and a miscalculation. But as a thinking historian, who never stopped reading in diplomatic archives, Kedourie thought it perfectly legitimate for states to calculate and act on self-interest. (This was always preferable to action the name of ideology. Ideological states, Kedourie believed, were intrinsically dangerous to their peoples and their neighbors.) Kedourie also knew and expected that states, working in a fog of partial knowledge, were bound to make mistakes in pursuing their interests. He never set himself up in Olympian judgment of policymakers for these sorts of errors.

But while he could understand errors of calculation, he could not pardon failures of will. For Kedourie, support for Saddam before 1990 was an error, but the decision not to remove him in 1991 was a failure. U.S. leaders lacked the will to act in pursuit of the U.S. national interest, and so fell down on their sworn duty. In a May 1991 lecture, Kedourie said this:

The American campaign stopped in its tracks by order of the president. Given this aggression by Iraq, and given that Iraq had to be stopped, one would have thought that it would be quite meaningless simply to liberate Kuwait and leave untouched the structures of the Baathist regime which had organized and committed the aggression. Iraq is a very populous and a rich country. If the regime remains in place, there is no way it can be prevented from reestablishing itself and acquiring new supplies of weapons of all kinds….It may not be possible next time around to organize an expedition of half a million troops and an armada in order to deal with this recurrent situation. So as things look to me now, the aftermath of the Gulf war seems a tremendous failure for the U.S.

As usual, Kedourie shows us the way. Saddam was no one’s creature. It would be an affront to justice to diminish Saddam’s criminal culpability by invoking U.S. policy mistakes, however egregious. Mistakes are not crimes.

The decision that left Saddam in power in 1991 was a monumental failure, and one that history has already judged severely. But at least credit those who did organize an expedition and an armada in 2003, and who did their duty despite the criticism of feckless “allies” and the absence of “international legitimacy.” Some of those who launched this expedition were party to the previous mistake and the earlier failure. By their actions this year, they have balanced the books—and then some.

U. of California’s Deans Don’t Quite Get It

On By Martin Kramer

This morning’s San Francisco Chronicle runs an op-ed on H.R. 3077 by two heavy-hitters in the University of California system: Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the UCLA International Institute, and David Leonard, dean of International and Area Studies at Berkeley. It’s the most intelligent thing that academics have produced so far in response to the bill. They don’t make the absurd claim that the Title VI advisory board would interfere in curriculum, and they accept the idea of a board in principle. But they do propose a change in the board’s composition. Unfortunately, this proposal rests on yet another misreading of the bill.

This is what they write:

The legislation dictates that the [seven-member] advisory board include two members from national security agencies, such as the CIA and the Department of Defense….Why should the national security agencies be singled out above other organizations concerned with international studies and foreign language education?

If any federal agency should be given privileged representation on the board, it is the Department of State. With decades of experience in educational and cultural exchange such as the Fulbright program, the State Department is best suited to help promote international higher education—particularly given the importance of fostering mutual understanding in the post-Sept. 11 world.

How have Professors Garrett and Leonard misread the bill? The two advisory board members who would represent government (and who would be appointed by the Secretary of Education) would not be appointed “from national security agencies.” Rather, they would be appointed from “agencies with national security responsibilities”—that’s the exact language of the bill.

What is an agency with national security responsibilities? Look at the definition used for the purposes of another government-supported program, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which funds scholarships for students who commit themselves to work in just these agencies. That definition includes these executive departments: the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury—and, yes, the Department of State. All of these departments are deemed to have “national security responsibilities.”

I agree with Professors Garrett and Leonard that there are no grounds to privilege the Department of Defense and the CIA over the Department of State, and the bill doesn’t do that. I hope they would agree that there is also no reason to exclude defense and intelligence agencies in appointments to the board, or to marginalize one department by privileging another. After all, these departments are part of one government, and all of them have needs in the field of international relations.

Congress must be wary lest it lend its hand to an academic boycott of the country’s intelligence and defense agencies, by excluding their representatives from the board. In the present bill, the Secretary of Education is given full discretion to make these two appointments, from whichever agency he or she sees fit. There is no credible reason to limit that discretion. The language of the bill on this point is perfect just as it is.

Professors Garrett and Leonard have one more complaint:

We are further concerned by the proposal that the board be given unusually broad powers to investigate grantee activities, by drawing on the full information available in all government agencies—including intelligence agencies. Because the activities of the Title VI programs are public, why should it be necessary to consult intelligence files to determine the range of the views they present?

This is a reference to a boiler-plate provision of the bill, which gives the advisory board the authority to secure from anywhere in government the information it needs to make its recommendations. That authority is essential, and it has nothing to do with investigating anyone’s views.

For example, one of the nagging questions about the Title VI program is how many of its beneficiaries go into government service. In April of last year, the president of the American Council on Education, David Ward, testified in support of Title VI before Congress, and made this claim:

Many of the graduates who benefited from these programs have gone on to serve in key U.S. government positions… Anecdotal (because the data are classified) evidence suggests that most career security foreign language and area specialists in agencies such as CIA and DIA were trained at institutions with Title VI centers. A local newspaper, for example, recently printed a picture of an intelligence officer in Afghanistan who had received language training at a Title VI center.

When Dr. Ward made this claim, I myself contested aspects of it, again on the basis of anecdotal evidence. But why should a government advisory board, presumably including two government officials, be limited to anecdotal evidence? Only agencies of government can tell the advisory board whether they benefit from the program in the way Dr. Ward claims they do.

So it’s perfectly proper that the law require those agencies to cooperate with the board in its work. The board’s recommendations on the effectiveness of Title VI—which spends $100 million of taxpayers’ money a year—should be grounded in fact and not anecdotes, especially when some of the facts are just waiting to be harvested in Washington.

Thanks to Professors Garrett and Leonard, the debate about H.R. 3077 in academe has moved forward. Yet they still don’t adequately grasp all aspects of the bill’s language and intent. It’s odd that Washington should have to educate the academy in the precise reading of a text. Call it an education.

Berkeley addendum. Over at Berkeley, the head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Professor Nezar AlSayyad, has called H.R. 3077 “an attempt to silence those who criticize the government.” He has also announced that his center, which now receives a hefty Title VI subsidy, will not apply for funding if the bill is passed. This, from a man whose main claim to administrative fame is the establishment of an Arab studies program named after the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, pumped up with $5 million from the Prince Sultan Charity Foundation. One wonders how much criticism of the Saudi government emerges from Berkeley’s center.

I’m going to hold Professor AlSayyad to his word. Let Berkeley’s Middle East center not apply. It will be one less application that has to be read and processed in Washington.

Yale Daily News Flunks Verbal

On By Martin Kramer

As a Princetonian, my expectations from Yale have never been very high. But I always assumed that the best of its students—or at least those students who edit the Yale Daily News—could read a text in English. This morning, even that assumption was shaken.

I refer to an editorial in today’s edition, under the headline: “Bill’s ‘Advisory Board’ is Cause for Concern.” The reference is to the International Studies in Higher Education Act, or H.R. 3077. (Full text here.) The bill would continue long-standing federal subsidies for area studies in universities. It also would establish a board to advise the Department of Education and Congress on how to improve supported programs. When the bill was in committee in the House of Representatives, academics expressed concern that the proposed board could go beyond general priorities, to delve into the curricula of individual programs. So the bill was modified to include this provision:

Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.

By any objective reading, that passage is unequivocal—indeed, it was probably dictated by the higher education lobby—and it trumps every other provision of the bill. It manifestly bars the board from mandating, directing, or controlling university curricula. That’s one reason the bill received unanimous bipartisan support in the House, whence it has been sent to the Senate.

Yet you won’t know that this safeguard even exists, if you rely on today’s Yale Daily News. It says this about the purpose of the board:

The act would create a federal advisory committee to oversee the curricula of foreign language and area studies programs that receive government funding. The Yale Center for International and Area Studies, which receives more than $5 million of federal funding annually, would be subject to any such curricular review….Even if the Bush administration is well-behaved, such input into curricula opens the door to dangerous behavior in the future.

“Oversee curricula”? “Curricular review”? “Input into curricula”? Do the editors of the Yale Daily News suffer from a collective reading disability? This spin on the bill is so at odds with its language that it leaves you wondering about the basic comprehension skills of the Yale editors. This doubt is reinforced by an earlier piece contributed by one of the newspaper’s regular columnists, containing this astonishing passage:

According to the language of the bill, professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course’s curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught.

When I first read this passage—written by a Yale senior—my jaw dropped. There is nothing whatsoever in the language of the bill to support a single one of these assertions. In the real world, this sort of thing—making it up—will get you failed out of journalism school, or fired by your newspaper.

But the explanation of poor comprehension is probably too simple, so let me offer a more sinister one. In the very first news story about the bill in the Yale Daily News, it was reported that some Yale professors opposed it. The university’s vice president for federal relations, Richard Jacobs, told the newspaper that Yale had already started to lobby key senators, including Sen. Christopher Dodd (D.-Conn.), against parts of the bill. Dodd sits on the Senate committee that has received the bill from the House (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP).

In other words, even before the Yale Daily News ran its first story, the Yale administration had opened a backstairs campaign against the bill. So the newspaper is dutifully following the lead of the administration and faculty. It reminds me of how Pravda picked up signals from the Politburo and amplified them—including the crude falsehoods.

So Yale is running a deliberately misleading campaign, relying on distortions, incitement, and the pliant editors of the campus newspaper, in order to leverage Sen. Dodd into opposing the bill. Why? Look at the composition of the HELP committee on which Sen. Dodd sits. Nearly all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats come from states whose institutions get little or no federal money for Middle Eastern studies, and not much more for area studies. Sen. Dodd is one of the few committee members who has constituents who receive the subsidy. And so Yale has assumed the responsibility of running a campaign directed at Sen. Dodd, on behalf of the entire area studies crowd.

What can you do to counter the lobbying efforts of big academe? If you are a resident of Connecticut, it’s easy: click here for a form and write to Sen. Dodd. Tell him that you fully support H.R. 3077 and the advisory board it would establish. Tell him that you are appalled by the deliberate distortion of the bill at the hands of its critics, especially at Yale. Tell him that the bill’s smooth passage is the least Congress can do to assure that this subsidy serves some national purpose at a moment of national need. For more arguments for the bill, read this address I gave two weeks ago, and follow the links from its right-hand panel.

If you’re not a resident of Connecticut, you can have just as much effect by writing the same things to Sen. Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), chair of the HELP committee. Click here for a form or write directly to greggstaff@labor.senate.gov. Also check this list of HELP committee members, to see if one of your senators is on it, and write to that senator, with a copy to Sen. Gregg.

Yale Library Joins Intifada? While I am indulging my bias against Yale, I wonder why Palestinian propaganda posters are featured at the website of the library’s Near East Collection. Is it because the posters are such outstanding and rare holdings? (The stuff looks pretty commonplace to me.) Or is it because of the politics of the collection’s curator and chief faculty adviser, both of whom signed the extremist Yale divestment petition against Israel? Just wondering.