Author: Martin Kramer

Too Few Yalies Know Arabic? Don’t Lose Sleep

On By Martin Kramer

Niall Ferguson, the historian who goes back and forth between New York University and Jesus College, Oxford, had an essay entitled “The Empire Slinks Back,” in The New York Times Magazine the weekend before last. After describing himself as a “member of the neoimperialist gang,” he questions whether Americans have the staying power to maintain a far-flung empire in places like Iraq. It’s a good question, and I share his doubts. It’s his solution that’s dubious.

Ferguson writes that in the British empire, “colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.” He then asks:

How many members of Harvard’s or Yale’s class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a ”clash of civilizations,” America’s brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.

Actually, it’s not remarkable at all. Britain’s brightest students, even at the height of empire, didn’t show much interest in other civilizations either. The Oxford historian D.W. Brogan wrote this in 1937: “The history of the Overseas Dominions has for many persons a very faint attraction….there may be full agreement that someone ought to know about them; but the normal attitude is that the someone is always someone else.”

Those mandarins-to-be in Oxford didn’t study the Bhagavad Gita or immerse themelves in Persian and Arabic poetry. They read Aristotle’s Ethics and studied Greek and Latin history, philosophy, and literature (“the Greats”). These were the firm foundations of their own civilization, and this was the education that sustained them as they trudged through jungles and across deserts. Empire is about defending and disseminating your own civilization. If you aren’t fully persuaded of its manifest superiority, you won’t bear up under the rigors of governing hostile peoples in unfriendly places.

Forty years ago, the Oxford orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb (who also spent a few futile years trying to bring Harvard up to speed) complained of how the British government “dismissed any proficiency in Oriental Studies, or even the knowledge of an oriental language, as irrelevant to its interests and useless, or worse than useless, as a qualification for the recruitment of its officers.” Worse than useless? Gibb alluded here to an attitude in the halls of power that rested on no little experience: persons too knowledgeable in their ways and languages might see things rather too readily from their point of view. And knowledge, turned into sympathy, could paralyze.

Since Ferguson chose Yale, here’s an example from Yale of how cultural knowledge can be trotted out to rationalize inaction. If you were a student there over the past two years, you would have heard the following pearls of wisdom from Dimitri Gutas, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and professor of Arabic. On bombing Osama and the Taliban during Ramadan: “Because there is this resentment there, the bombing during Ramadan will be seen as an additional insult. It will be interpreted as such by the ideologues and seen as such by the moderates, the ones that America should be trying to win over.” On bombing Saddam and his minions in Baghdad, last month: “How would we feel now if Rome was being bombarded and was in imminent danger of being destroyed? Basically this is the kind of resonance that Baghdad has in the Islamic world. It is going to be a huge wound to the soul of over a billion people on this earth.”

So as a member of the elect one percent of Yale students enrolled in a course on the Near East, you would have learned all the historical and religious excuses for not dropping guided munitions, even on the worst of the lot. Why is this better preparation for exercising power than, say, the baseball team?

It is because of professors like these that I’m skeptical about Ferguson’s recommendation. He argues that the only way to pry Americans out of their stay-at-home insularity is to inculcate knowledge of places like the Middle East in the elite universities.

Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I hope, exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed generals with good Pentagon connections. The work needs to begin, and swiftly, to encourage American students at the country’s leading universities to think more seriously about careers overseas—and by overseas I do not mean in London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic?

This seems to me to be a particularly bad example of how to recruit an imperial elite. At the best universities, students who major in Middle Eastern studies do learn languages, but they also get indoctrinated by a professoriate that is dead-set against the exercise of American power against anyone for any reason. This sort of preparation is more likely to produce a human shield than a proconsul. Middle Eastern studies in America, as presently constituted, are worse than useless to the defense of American interests. The U.S. government’s decision, after 9/11, to double the number of scholarships in Muslim languages will only mean that in the next crisis, there will be even more “experts” urging us to stay home, lest we enrage the “Arab street.”

The United States doesn’t need a lot of new grads to explain “why they hate us.” What it needs are people who are so persuaded of its mission in the world that they are prepared to undergo some hardship and risk to advance it. I happen to think that calling that mission “empire” just gets in the way. But whatever the mission is called, its bearers have to be persuaded that it is the worthiest of causes. That demands cultural self-esteem and self-mastery—the true purpose of an elite education. It doesn’t require a working knowledge of Arabic.

Indiana Jones or Inside Job at Iraq Museum?

On By Martin Kramer

On Tuesday, directors of some of the world’s leading museums met at the British Museum in London. Their mission: salvaging what can be salvaged at the plundered Iraq Museum. Their point man in Baghdad will be Dr. Donny George, research director of the Iraq Museum, who visited London for the meeting. There was much ado about the much-quoted Dr. George, who gave a colorful account of the museum under siege. He (again) pointed an accusing finger at the United States, for failing to prevent the “crime of the century.” (“Was it done intentionally? I don’t know. But moving a tank 50 of 60 meters would have saved mankind’s heritage.”)

And he got glowing press in London. The Guardian reported that his “bravery in tackling looters after the first Gulf war has earned him something of a reputation as an Indiana Jones figure.” He also made a great impression on officialdom. “A typically wet performance on Tuesday from culture secretary Tessa Jowell,” noted the Financial Times. “She found it ‘truly humbling’ to meet Donny George, veteran research director of Baghdad’s National Museum.” Clearly, Dr. George has landed on his feet.

But no one who knows how Saddam’s Iraq worked should think for a moment that Dr. George was anything less than a faithful servant of his master. In fact, he seems to have been less the Indiana Jones of Iraqi archaeology, and more its Tariq Aziz. He was the urbane handler of the foreign archaeologists, with one overarching purpose: turning them into an anti-embargo lobby among the well-heeled. To judge from the sanctions-busting by many foreign archaeologists, he did a pretty good job. He certainly enjoyed the confidence of Saddam Hussein. Two years ago, Dr. George boasted to a foreign journalist that Saddam not only read his reports, but returned them with careful notes in the margins. Reports on what? Isn’t that something we should know, before we feel “truly humbled” in Dr. George’s presence?

In September 1990, within weeks of Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, the staff of the Iraq Museum turned up in Kuwait, loaded the contents of Kuwait’s National Museum into open lorries (their methods were “anything but professional,” notes the collection’s patron), and hauled them across the desert to the basement of their own museum. Kuwait had been abolished by Saddam, and these treasures were now part of Iraq’s patrimony. Most of the plunder was returned to the Kuwaitis—after Iraq’s defeat and a U.N. resolution. But some of the collection was damaged, and 59 prime objects “disappeared,” including a few spectacular emeralds—just the sort of thing a Baath higher-up would want in his pocket. Wouldn’t you like to hear more about that earlier Baath heist from Dr. George, before feeling “truly humbled” in his presence?

If you visited the Iraq Museum over the last couple of years (in defiance of your government’s travel ban), Dr. George would have shown you the head of a winged bull statue, the kind found at the entrance to Assyrian palaces. This one had been stolen and cut up by a gang of smugglers. Their bad luck: they got caught. Dr. George then would have told you the fate that befell the smugglers: ten of them were executed. Dr. George called that theft the “crime of the century,” explaining that antiquities smuggling endangered Iraq’s “national security.” He also told a journalist in 2001 that new and harsher penalties for looting of artefacts were due to be put in effect that year, including the death penalty. Wouldn’t you want to know how Iraq came to impose such despotic penalties, and whether they were urged upon Saddam by Iraq’s archaeological bureaucrats, before allowing yourself to be “truly humbled” by Dr. George?

Now that you no longer feel all that humbled, read this paragraph from the New York Times report of the London meeting:

Although some evidence suggests that people with inside knowledge of the museum were responsible for stealing the more valuable items, Mr. George said he had no information indicating that the culprits were officials connected with his antiquities department or with the government of Saddam Hussein.

“I know how Saddam Hussein cared for antiquities,” he said in dismissing the possibility of an inside job. How fortunate for Dr. George, his staff, and all his old superiors! How could anyone believe any of them would be involved?

Dr. George is riding high on the sympathy and guilt of the world, and there are no other Iraqis who can be relied upon to do the salvage work. But a time for hard questions will come. Already, Iraqis aren’t returning artefacts to the museum staff, preferring to hand them over to U.S. troops. “It has been a challenge to us that the Iraq museum is closely identified with both the prior regime and its Baathist Party,” says Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Manhattan assistant district attorney with the Marines in Baghdad, who is handling the investigation.

I suggest he include a thorough inquiry into the connections between the Iraq Museum and the regime, and seriously probe the possibility that the “crime of the century” was an inside job. Kanan Makiya, while in Iraq, heard that the plundering of the museum “was the work of newly deposed Baathist officials, who had been selling off our patrimony as they saw their days were numbered.” Dr. George and other antiquities officials were the loyal servants of these thugs for thirty years. I’m sure they have interesting stories to tell. Certainly no American official should feel humbled in the presence of any of them, and eventually the interrogation lights should be turned on all of them—including Dr. George.

Why? Just listen to the American archaeologists. The American Schools of Oriental Research have described the plundering of Iraq’s museum as “comparable to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the Vandal and Mogul invasions and the ravages of the conquistadors.” One American archaeologist, much interviewed these days, has described what happened as “the greatest catastrophe ever to befall a cultural institution in the history of the world,” which would make it the crime of all centuries.

If the report in the New York Times this morning is anything to go on, it may yet turn out that these archaeologists fell for a fabulous exaggeration, propagated largely by the Baath’s apparatchiks at the Iraq Museum. But since we don’t know yet, let’s have the mother of all criminal investigations, to find out exactly what happened. No one should be above suspicion—especially the people who knew where to find the best lots, who had the keys, and who had long-standing ties with the criminals who ran the regime. Quite a few people fit that description. None of them is a U.S. Marine.

The Expulsion That Never Was

On By Martin Kramer

Among the predictions about the war that didn’t pan out, there is one that hasn’t been subjected to post-war ridicule, but that very much deserves it. This is the December letter, signed by over 1,000 academics, predicting and warning against Israel’s possible “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the “fog of war.” The letter ended with this recommendation: “We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.”

The United States made no such communication to the Israeli government, yet lo and behold, no expulsion took place. In the “fog of war,” the Palestinian street demonstrated wildly for Saddam, Palestinian politicians jockeyed for position, and Israel prepared with gas masks and duct tape, like a proper ally/client of the United States. All of this was completely forseeable by anyone with an iota of expertise, experience, and common sense. It was not foreseen by many of America’s leading Middle East “experts,” who put their names to this ridiculous letter, and who in fact seem to have initiated it.

One of the original signatories was Zachary Lockman, professor of Middle Eastern studies and history at New York University. Lockman justified the letter in this way:

People [in the Israeli government] have been calling for expulsion for years, but the Israeli government, including Sharon, realizes that it would not be acceptable under normal circumstances. But in middle of a war in Iraq, especially if they attack Israel, there would be panic and one can imagine all sorts of horrible scenarios. The public could countenance this, or the U.S. could turn a blind eye.

My comment back in December: “Let me not put too fine a point on it: anyone signing this letter, effectively condemning Israel in advance for something it has no intention of doing, is either an ignoramus or a propagandist.” Now that we are after the fact, it’s a point worth reiterating.

I sorted out the Middle East “experts” among the signatories and listed them back in December, so I won’t waste space here. But let me just list the original signatories (eight of fifteen) who are professors of Middle Eastern studies:

Joel Beinin, Stanford
Beshara Doumani, UC Berkeley
Zachary Lockman, New York University
Timothy Mitchell, New York University
Gabi Piterberg, UC Los Angeles
Glenn E. Robinson, Naval Postgraduate School
Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas
Judith Tucker, Georgetown University

And among the “additional signatories,” special mention should be made of Laurie Brand, University of Southern California, who is president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

These people have (once again) brought shame on their discipline. Those among them who claim special expertise on Israel and its policies have discredited themselves as interpreters and teachers of that country’s politics and society. And they are now collectively in the moral position of owing apologies to the Israeli people and the Israeli government—of Ariel Sharon. I suggest they make them at the next MESA conference.