2008 Woodie Awards
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Opinions
AU and Iraq
By Caleb Rossiter on 1/22/04
In "War and Peace," Leo Tolstoy ruminates long and hard on the causes of the French invasion of Russia in 1812. He rejects the notion that Napoleon's order to invade was the cause, citing the many times in his career that Napoleon gave similar orders that weren't carried out. Tolstoy instead sees the invasion as the collection of millions of individual acts by ordinary Frenchmen, who responded to the feverish air of empire by deciding that it was normal to leave their peaceful cobbler's shops and schoolhouses, be trained in martial matters, and plunge to the east to take part in a mass act of murder and theft.
All empires, from Caesar's to Bush's, are alike in one important respect, which is that decisions by their leaders to unleash military power in aggression and invasion are made possible only by millions of acts of individual collaboration. One of those acts is taking place on the AU campus right now, as AU profits from a contract to assist the U.S. occupying forces in Iraq. Under the contract, which follows a chain of command from the Pentagon's occupation director, Paul Bremer, to the U.S. Agency for International Development and its subcontractor, Creative Associates, Inc., AU personnel are advising the Pentagon-appointed ministry of education. The contract comes up for renewal this spring.
Exactly what AU is doing and how much AU is profiting is unclear, since the AU administration - confusing a University and its commitment to academic freedom and debate with a business and its need to hide its work from its competitors - has declared the contract confidential, and refused to allow students, staff or faculty to review it.
No citizen, and no university, can remain neutral during a war. Either you are helping the war effort, or you are not. AU has a schizophrenic history in this regard, eagerly serving as the home of the U.S. chemical weapons program in World War I, but also establishing a School of International Service devoted to building peace and respect for human rights and international rules of conduct. Now AU faces a defining moment. The United States is engaged in a war of aggression in Iraq, having attacked and occupied a sovereign country on fraudulent grounds and in defiance of international law. AU can be the civil servant of empire, one of the millions of collaborators whose individual acts of support, as during the Vietnam War, make the aggression possible, or it can be the conscience of democracy, one of the millions of opponents whose individual acts of protest, also as during the Vietnam War, make the aggression unsustainable.
All empires, from Caesar's to Bush's, are alike in one important respect, which is that decisions by their leaders to unleash military power in aggression and invasion are made possible only by millions of acts of individual collaboration. One of those acts is taking place on the AU campus right now, as AU profits from a contract to assist the U.S. occupying forces in Iraq. Under the contract, which follows a chain of command from the Pentagon's occupation director, Paul Bremer, to the U.S. Agency for International Development and its subcontractor, Creative Associates, Inc., AU personnel are advising the Pentagon-appointed ministry of education. The contract comes up for renewal this spring.
Exactly what AU is doing and how much AU is profiting is unclear, since the AU administration - confusing a University and its commitment to academic freedom and debate with a business and its need to hide its work from its competitors - has declared the contract confidential, and refused to allow students, staff or faculty to review it.
No citizen, and no university, can remain neutral during a war. Either you are helping the war effort, or you are not. AU has a schizophrenic history in this regard, eagerly serving as the home of the U.S. chemical weapons program in World War I, but also establishing a School of International Service devoted to building peace and respect for human rights and international rules of conduct. Now AU faces a defining moment. The United States is engaged in a war of aggression in Iraq, having attacked and occupied a sovereign country on fraudulent grounds and in defiance of international law. AU can be the civil servant of empire, one of the millions of collaborators whose individual acts of support, as during the Vietnam War, make the aggression possible, or it can be the conscience of democracy, one of the millions of opponents whose individual acts of protest, also as during the Vietnam War, make the aggression unsustainable.