Brainwashed
Page 15
In the end, it all comes down to patriotism. Professors hate America, and Americans are patriots. So professors insult patriotism as simplistic. They compare patriots to terrorists.
The professors are the intellectual terrorists. May they reap what they sow.
9
TEACHING FOR SADDAM
Professors like terrorists, and they love Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime. Since Day One they have opposed any war on Iraq to rid the world of his murderous government or to assure the security of America and American interests. While they pay lip service to the idea that Saddam is a “bad guy,” professors press students to take up the anti-war banner, bash George W. Bush, and rally to Saddam’s defense.
“Put these [anti-war] signs in your yards when you get home. Get on the Internet,” University of Kentucky professor Nikky Finney urged a group of student protesters. “Don’t just preach to the choir.”1
At an anti-war protest, Professor Judith Frank of Amherst College vowed to use her classroom as a podium to express her views: “We can teach, that we can do at least, even if we don’t know how effective it will be. Because if you wait until you know it’s effective, nothing will get done.”2
At Citrus College, Professor Rosalyn Kahn told her students in Speech 106 to write anti-war letters to President Bush for extra credit. When several of her students asked if they could write pro-war letters, Kahn told them that pro-war letters would not be accepted.3
At Wayne State University, professors rushed to brainwash students to oppose war and President Bush. Two hundred and ten faculty members signed a petition calling for a university-wide day of reflection on the war. “The WSU academic community should undertake a variety of opportunities to raise questions about this war drive and its potential consequences,” the petition stated. “We must, as scholars, teachers, and citizens, assume our responsibilities to engage in constructive discussion and action.” Professor Francis Shor, co-chair of the committee responsible for the petition, said that the goal was for students to become increasingly knowledgeable on the topic of war and more involved in the anti-war movement.4
Professor Brian J. Foley of the Widener University School of Law wrote that it was his duty to teach his students “as the bombs kill and maim innocent people in Baghdad. I will teach my class in the hope that the skills my students learn will make them better citizens, who will ask questions and demand answers before they let their country be led into war. It’s the most patriotic protest I can make.”5
Is indoctrinating students patriotic?
“NO BLOOD FOR OIL”
Many professors, believing that there was no moral justification for a war against the Saddam Hussein regime, attribute scurrilous motives to the Bush administration’s desire for regime change in Iraq. As with anti-war protesters in general, the most common motive professors ascribed to the Bush administration was “war for oil.” Since Iraq holds the second largest petroleum reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia) and untapped fields of hydrocarbon fuel, and since America could never be attacking Iraq for moral or self-defense purposes, these professors argue that President Bush is putting American lives on the line to preserve lower gas prices. It makes no difference to the professors that America could save time, money, and lives by merely dealing with Saddam Hussein, or that America could just as easily attack Saudi Arabia. No, American capitalist imperialism is the root of this conflict.
“This could prove to be the biggest oil grab in modern history, providing hundreds of billions of dollars to US oil firms,” writes Professor Michael T. Klare in the Nation. “But is oil worth spilling the blood of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians who get caught in the way?”6 “[P]eople everywhere know that if not for oil, the United States would not be pursuing a war,” nods Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas.7
Professor Hugh Gusterson concurs. He told an MIT student anti-war crowd of about six hundred that war in Iraq is “about oil, about Israel, about American global dominance.” Apparently the fact that America does not want to occupy Iraq but instead wants to set up a democracy there in place of a brutal dictatorship does nothing to persuade Gusterson, who insulted the Bush administration’s attempt to fight terrorism as a “squalid, inhumane vision.”8
Winthrop Professor Stephen Smith echoed the despicable “blood for oil” canard at a rally in South Carolina. “Would the United States attack Iraq if its main export were broccoli?” Smith asked before hundreds of cheering students. “The only peace [Bush] wants is a piece of Iraqi oil, if not all of it.”9 Hilarious. If only Smith’s take on foreign policy were half as clever as his oh-so-witty puns.
At a Karl Rove speech at the University of Utah, English professor Tom Huck carried a “No Blood for Oil” sign, and told reporters, “This is about imperialism. Iraq does not represent a threat to the United States. They’ve been trying to prove that for years.”10 If Iraq truly wanted to persuade the world of its non-violent intentions, refusing to provide proof of disarmament even in the face of war is a funny way of doing it.
In an inarticulate, rambling letter to the editor in the Auburn Plainsman, Auburn Professor Yehia El Mogahzy called on Americans to open their eyes to Bush administration perfidy: “Wake up America, spend some time watching the war game that we are about to play, over $300 billion dollars of our money is about to be spent on a war game. Against one person and thousands of children and innocent people. Blood for oil.”11 A “war game”? Since when is toppling a regime and freeing millions of Iraqis a war game? And exactly when did war on Iraq become a war against “thousands of children and innocent people”? The US military has taken amazing steps not to harm the civilian population, and the Bush administration has threatened to prosecute Iraqi officials who harm Iraqi civilians. This isn’t blood for oil—it’s blood to save civilians and preserve American security.
HEGEMONY
If it’s not about oil, it’s about hegemony, the professors declare. Any war in Iraq is just another American power-grab, an attempt to set up a US empire. In much the same way that the American intellectuals condemned Ronald Reagan as an imperialist for his fight against communism, they now condemn George W. Bush for his fight against terrorism.
Howard University’s Harold Scott Jr. observed that “This [war] is not international leadership; it is an imperialist position worthy of Napoleon— or the Roman Empire at the start of its decline.”12 Professor emeritus Richard Falk of Princeton University sees war in Iraq as an attempt by the US to “dominate the world,” and portrays the War on Terror as a conflict between “two essentially fundamentalist visions,” Islamic fundamentalism on one hand and economic liberalism on the other.13 Maybe the professors are uncomfortable about exporting democracy, but the rest of us aren’t.
Michael Hardt, a professor at Duke University, also casts aspersions on any American attempt to install democracy in Iraq. “The ultimate hubris of the US political leaders is their belief that they can not only force regime change and name new leaders for various countries, but also actually shape the global environment—an audacious extension of the old imperialist ideology of mission civilisatrice [a mission to civilize]. Regime change in Iraq is only the first step in an ambitious project to reconstruct the political order of the entire Middle East.”14 God forbid that the United States should try and improve the lives of millions in the Middle East! Let those brutal dictators alone, you fool imperialists!
For Professor Ronnie Lipschutz of the University of California at Santa Cruz, American policy has been power-oriented since September 11. His conclusion: “If the United States does succeed in going it alone—or substantially alone—it will mark the beginning of a new geopolitical era after hegemony, that of American Empire.”15 If the goal is American Empire, why would the goal of the Bush administration be to set up a democracy in Iraq rather than a friendly dictatorship? Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, stated on Meet the Press on April 6, 2003, that even if the Iraqi democracy elected an Islamist government,
the US would not act against it. Is that empire?
Professor Jim Rego of Swarthmore College expressed his views on the war. “I think we’ve run out of people’s butts to kick and that we essentially want to keep the butt-kicking going,” he stated at a panel discussion.16 How articulate. And how wrong. There are plenty of butts left to kick.
Predictably, the late Professor Edward Said, formerly of Columbia University, jumped on the “hegemony” bandwagon. But when he got bored riding the bandwagon, he got down and pushed it. US policy in Iraq, he said, was a “grotesque show” based on desire for “oil and hegemony.” The policy, he claimed, was forwarded by a “small cabal” of unelected government officials who sought to wage war on behalf of an “avenging Judeo-Christian god of war.” This kind of US-led evil was nothing new according to Said, who then said that the US has a long history of “reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.”17 An “avenging Judeo-Christian god of war”? We’re not the ones yelling “Allahu akhbar” and flying civilian airliners into skyscrapers.
BUSH’S REVENGE
In their quest to portray George W. Bush as stupid and petty, many professors say that Bush wanted a war on Iraq to avenge Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt on Bush’s father and to finish the job George H.W. Bush started in 1991. The very idea that President Bush would put Americans in harm’s way and spend billions to rebuild Iraq because Hussein’s agents planned to kill his father is absurd, to say the least. But absurdity has never stopped professors before.
“It’s a simple story of father to son: ‘I’m doing your work, Daddy. Are you proud of me?’” Professor Becky Thompson of Duke informed an antiwar protest mainly composed of Duke students. “To me it seems like [the United States] missed a really early lesson on how to play in the sandbox.”18
Professor Alon Ben-Meir of New York University agrees with Thompson: “I can understand [Bush’s] anger and the hatred he must feel toward the Iraqi leader, but I never imagined that a personal vendetta would influence his decision to wage war against Iraq. But I have come to believe it has, for why else did he mention the assassination attempt in the same breath as when he spoke about the need to get rid of Saddam? The recognition that Mr. Bush is acting from personal reasons, at least in part, explains the growing skepticism of our allies and many congressional leaders concerning his efforts in making the case for war.”19 But President Bush never explicitly mentioned the assassination attempt as a rationale for war. When facts are not at Ben-Meir’s disposal, he makes them up as he goes along.
Ben-Meir only accuses Bush of putting American soldiers in danger for personal vengeance. Professor Walt Brasch of Bloomsburg University goes even further, accusing the president of trying to convince the American people that “as many as twenty-four million Iraqis need to be wiped off the earth in order to destroy Saddam Hussein and avenge the uncompleted work of George the Elder.”20 Twenty-four million Iraqis? The implication: Bush wants to nuke Iraq and kill every citizen of that country. By essentially accusing Bush of genocide, Brasch places him on a par with Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.
Some Bush-haters get even more twisted when they set foot on a college campus. When Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) spoke to a crowd at the University of Southern California, she railed against Bush’s Iraq policy: “Some of us, maybe foolishly, gave this president the authority to go after the terrorists. We didn’t know he was going to go crazy with it. Now we know he has a problem with Saddam Hussein. We know that. We know that he’s got to take revenge for what Saddam did to his daddy.”21
WAG THE DOG?
If invading Iraq wasn’t about oil, hegemony, or revenge, there must be yet another ulterior motive for the Bush administration. Harkening back to the Clinton administration, the professors came up with an idea. If Clinton could fire some missiles into Afghanistan to deflect attention from a burgeoning sex scandal, the Bush administration must be pursuing war with Iraq to deflect attention from domestic issues, specifically the economy.
Professor Stephen Walt, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, questioned the timing of President Bush’s move toward war. “The timing is being driven primarily by domestic politics,” he told the press. “Iraq is the next step in extending his wartime presidency,” agreed Professor Constantine Spiliotes of Dartmouth College.22 The economy hit a mild recession in the middle of 2000, but Bush made no mention of an attack on Iraq until after September 11, 2001. If war were a diversion from the economy, why wouldn’t Bush have pushed for war, even before September 11?
Bush-hating Temple University government professor James Hilty acerbically stated: “Bush has almost no domestic legs so he has to be commander-in-chief. There’s definitely a political agenda here. If the war on terrorism stops, people will wake up and see the effects of the humongous tax cut Bush engineered last year.”23 If Bush were so concerned about the public “discovering” his tax cuts, why would he try and ram through some more tax cuts, as he did before, during and after the war in Iraq? Bush is hardly embarrassed about his supply-side ideology, and for Hilty to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
“It has been suggested that, whether the US ultimately goes to war with Iraq or not, the campaign against Saddam Hussein was meant to influence domestic American politics and the November 2002 election,” suggests former University of California at San Diego professor Chalmers Johnson. “Faced with 2002 midterm elections, the leaders of the Republican party were desperate to deflect discussion from issues like the president’s and vice-president’s close ties to the corrupt Enron Corporation, the huge and growing federal budget deficit, tax cuts that massively favor the rich, a severe loss of civil liberties under attorney general Ashcroft.”24 H.L. Mencken said a person could never go wrong underestimating the intelligence of Americans. Looks like Johnson was taking him at his word—and then some. He thinks the public is too slobberingly stupid to see through a misdirection ploy by its president. Then again, is it possible that the public isn’t nearly so stupid and there wasn’t any misdirection?
Professor Brian J. Foley of the Widener University School of Law in Delaware feels that President Bush has deceived the nation. “Certainly, Bush has much to distract us from,” Foley writes, citing economic policy and the War on Terror as Bush “failings.” Then Foley goes to the limit, accusing Bush of an “enormous abuse of presidential power,” “[endangering] our nation’s security” with his “war talk.”25 For a man who believes that war talk can do so much to endanger Americans, does Foley realize the value his pacifism could hold for enemies of America?
“REGIME CHANGE” IN AMERICA
On April 2, 2003, Democratic presidential nomination candidate John F. Kerry stated to a crowd of Democrats in New Hampshire: “What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.”26 Naturally, the comment triggered a firestorm of protest from the Right. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the House majority leader, called the remark “desperate.” Denny Hastert, House speaker, added that the statement was “not what we need at this time.”27 Of course, professors beat Kerry to the punch a long time ago; they’ve been counseling American “regime change” since the 2000 election. With the war on Iraq, criticism of the Bush administration has kicked into even higher gear.
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes bringing an article of impeachment against the Bush administration. “[W]e don’t want a police state in the name of an oil empire,” he calmly explains.28 I hope that Boyle is using the royal “we,” because not many people stand behind him in his desire to let terrorists and murderers roam free.
Ayida Mthembu, associate dean of Counseling and Support Services at MIT, told an ecstatic anti-war crowd of students, faculty, staff and administrators: “With this war, we are witnessing the effects of a coup d’etat. But by coming out here, we can be renewed. Bush and his White House Negroes want us to be confused an
d passive and afraid. They want us to watch TV and doubt our common sense. But common sense says, war is horrible. Being here says, we love the world enough to struggle together to make America the place we want it to be.”29 Aside from the blatant racism of the statement (calling Condeleezza Rice and Colin Powell house negroes hardly gains points for good taste), it is incredibly naïve. If America could live in a world without war, we would surely do so. But sometimes war is necessary to ensure the security of our citizens and the growth of freedom around the world—something a vast number of professors either do not understand or appreciate.
But according to Professor Gene Burns of the University of Montana, the Bush administration is hardly a force for freedom. In fact, Bush and his cronies are fascists. “Don’t ever think America is free from tyranny,” he warned an anti-war crowd composed mainly of students. “Let your voices be heard.”30
Professor Wythe Holt Jr. of the University of Alabama School of Law fully agrees. He stated that the strongest reason against going to war is that American freedom would be “trampled” by the war itself. “We not only oppose war, but we oppose shutting us down,” Holt said. “You have to be brave in order to say these things today.”31
Drake University law professor Sally Frank was even more flamboyant in her protests for “free speech”: she ripped the Bill of Rights out of a copy of the US Constitution and threw it into a toilet to assert that civil liberties, immigrant rights, health care, and jobs are being “flushed down the toilet.” “That’s what (Attorney General John) Ashcroft and Bush have done to our civil liberties,” Frank said.32
These professors are extremely loud for people whose freedom of speech is supposedly being silenced. The Ashcroft/Bush/Rumsfeld Gestapo must have missed them this time around.