by Ben Shapiro
“THE CASE HASN’T BEEN MADE”
Ever since President Bush began talking about war in Iraq, professors have complained about the Bush administration’s failure to make a “convincing case” for going to war. Even after Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Left’s favorite cabinet member, made his highly-regarded speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003, peaceniks whined that they needed more evidence.
“We believe that the false evidence that the US president has peddled regarding Iraq’s imminent threat to the US, together with the US government and media’s manipulation of the American public’s grief over last year’s 9/11 tragedy, mask a deceptive and wholly undemocratic campaign to coerce the American people and the peoples of the world into accepting the unlawful and unwarranted US invasion of other countries.” This statement was signed by forty Filipino US university educators, including professors, lecturers, or other staff members from the University of California at San Diego, the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of California at Riverside, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Texas at Austin, San Jose State University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Sonoma State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts, the University of California at Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, the University of Denver, Old Dominion University, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, New York University, Bloomfield College, the University of Miami, City College of San Francisco, DePaul University, and the University of Washington.33 Strong language, but completely unfounded. Invasion of Iraq was indeed warranted, and the Bush administration’s push for war was not “wholly undemocratic”—at the beginning of the war, a vast majority of the country supported war in Iraq, even without the approval of the United Nations.
Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale University, held the Bush administration to a higher standard than the United Nations. “To justify an invasion,” he wrote, “it is not enough for the United States to insist that it already has enough evidence of a material breach” of UN resolutions. Ackerman did not give a concrete standard of justification for the Bush administration to reach.34 It must be his opinion.
Finally, the Bush administration decided to risk its intelligence sources and let Secretary of State Colin Powell present evidence of Iraqi non-compliance on February 5, 2003. For professors, that wasn’t good enough. “[I]t was striking how weak was the case Powell offered; the charts, maps and phone intercepts were more impressive than the underlying evidence or conclusions. Even if his claims were all true, nothing he said makes the case for war,” sneered Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas.35 Professor As’ad Abukhalil of California State University at Stanislaus concurred, snorting that despite Powell’s presentation, “the claims of terrorism links remain hollow.”36 Wrong.
Even the anti-war New York Times acknowledged the power of Powell’s presentation, writing: “Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have.”37
DEFYING INTERNATIONAL LAW
The professorial elite, devoid of respect for traditional morals and values, find their moral guidance in international law. And if the Bush administration transgressed international law by attacking Iraq, they feel it is just as wrong and evil as Saddam Hussein.
While the US pursued diplomacy in the United Nations, professors proudly spoke of their Neville Chamberlain-esque foreign policy ideals. Professor John E. Lillich of Purdue University encouraged President Bush to stop talking about Saddam’s bad qualities, for the sake of negotiations. “Even if a guy is as bad as Hitler, he’s a human being, and you have to do negotiations with human beings,” Lillich stated, somehow forgetting that negotiation with Hitler didn’t end in triumph. “What the president may not realize is that he can be a bigger winner by negotiating a settlement than by winning a war. If he could settle this without a war, he’d win the Nobel Peace Prize.”38 Wow, a Nobel Peace Prize? Like that great president Jimmy Carter? Now there’s an achievement.
After the US withdrew its request for a second UN resolution authorizing use of force in Iraq because of French and Russian threats to veto the resolution, Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal of MIT hysterically declared, “I’m a lawyer, and I am here to tell you, the US has just trashed international law and our own laws.”39 Professor Marjorie Cohn of the Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego similarly stated, “There is no legal justification for a preemptive attack on Iraq.”40 On legal grounds, perhaps they are right. On moral grounds, they are wrong to the most extreme degree. There could not be a more moral goal than freeing the people of Iraq from brutal tyranny, democratizing the region, and ensuring American security.
Of course, none of these goals matter to anti-war professors. Professor Scott Cawelti of the University of Northern Iowa bashed the Bush Iraq policy and appealed to European sensibilities. “[O]ur go-it-alone policy has created worldwide disdain, if not contempt,” he penned. “Europeans, who know real war far better than Americans, see our president’s insistence on making war to ensure peace as an impossible trap. They see our president as a cowboy superhero, obsessed with fighting evil.”41 Europeans know real war, all right. Every time they have one, the US has to come save them. We are cowboy superheroes—if we weren’t, the whole continent would be speaking German right now.
With the Bush administration embarking on a new strategy of preemptive warfare against our enemies, including Iraq, professors are going out of their gourds. “It’s not a just war!” they continue to scream, in classic Jimmy Carter fashion.
“[W]e side with the principled opponents of war against Iraq, relying not only on international law, including the UN Charter, but also on the moral and religious guidelines contained in the just war doctrine,” declared Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University, along with his CounterPunch co-author, David Krieger.42
NYU law professor Philip Alston asserted to the Associated Press that ignoring the UN, “opens the door for every country to take the law into its own hands and launch preemptive military strikes without any universally binding restraints.”43 “It is utterly irresponsible,” agrees Professor Srinivas Aravamudan of Duke University. “We are embarking on a new imperial era of carnage.”44 September 11 is carnage. Gassing Kurds and murdering Shi’ites is carnage. Removing Saddam Hussein from power is justice.
The case can be made that the United States did work in accordance with international law, but the truth is that it really doesn’t matter. We have a higher moral obligation than resolutions from the UN, and if France insists on blocking resolutions, we have the duty to ignore the UN.
USEFUL IDIOTS AND AMERICA-HATERS
Some professors cross the line between free speech and useful idiocy or flat-out treachery. While each professor has the right to speak out under the First Amendment, some provide comfort and aid to the enemies of the United States.
Professors advocated the “human shield” movement, which sent hundreds of Western civilians to protect Saddam’s assets from the American military. “A number of groups have been choosing to do this,” smiled Joseph Elder, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin. “They call themselves witnesses for peace or witnesses of suffering . . . I think the fact groups are doing this is a reflection of the fact there are a lot of Americans who are very opposed to any action of war on the part of the [United States],” Elder said. According to Elder, the scale of the human shield movement dwarfs any comparable movement in the past.45
Former Harvard professor Helen Caldicott also got in on the act, imploring Pope John Paul II to go to Baghdad and act as a human shield. Since the Bush administration has “no reservations about slaughtering up to 500,000 innocents in Iraq, there is one person whose life they absol
utely will not risk. That person is Pope John Paul II,” she wrote in a letter to the pontiff, whom she also called “the ultimate human shield.”46
When not fighting for the human shield movement, professors were busy traveling to Baghdad to act as Saddam’s propaganda patsies.
In November 2002, Professor Bill Quigley of the Loyola University New Orleans School of Law traveled to Iraq as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a joint US/UK program to protest economic sanctions against Iraq. In a series of obviously contrived events, Quigley was given the impression that the Iraqis living under Saddam’s brutality wanted to prevent his removal. Quigley was approached by an Iraqi soldier, who welcomed him to Iraq, and then said: “America, Yes!” followed by a thumbs-down and “Bush, no!” He was approached by a man who gave him a picture of his eight-month-old daughter, with a message on the back of the picture reading: “Dear American administration mems. I am Sala Adil. I am 8 months. I am an Iraqi. I would be very grateful if you let me live peacefully away of bombing and sanctions like all the children of the world. Sala.” Like the useful idiot he most certainly is, Quigley bought into the whole act, observing, “I am using my freedom to try and stop our government from paying for regime change with the lives of Iraqi sons and daughters, especially the lives of innocent civilians like little Sala.”47
On January 12, 2003, a thirty-five-member delegation mainly comprised of academics touched down in Baghdad for a “fact-finding” tour. The tour was sponsored by the University of Baghdad, a tool of Saddam.
Dr. James E. Jennings, a former Illinois University professor, led the delegation, which visited Iraqi schools, hospitals, and other sites in order to promote peace. “Not in Hanoi or Panama or Baghdad last time, or anywhere else for that matter, has there been this many people to a city that probably will be bombed to bits saying, ‘Don’t do it. It doesn’t make sense,’” the noble professor told the Washington Post. Fellow delegate and Le Moyne College professor Keith Watenpaugh added, “We’re going to go back to our schools and our communities to tell them what’s happening here. People in America need to see people who think it’s okay to oppose this war.”48
It is difficult to tell whether all the professors on the tour realized how Saddam would manipulate their tour and use it for anti-American propaganda. But Professor Michael Rooke-Ley of the University of Oregon School of Law certainly did. “Yes, our visit was carefully choreographed by the Iraqis, and initially we saw only what they wanted us to see. . . . Did we risk being used as propaganda tools for the Iraqi government? Of course— just as others have served the Bush administration’s public relations efforts here at home,” Rooke-Ley wrote.49 Except that in America, you have the choice of what to say and what to see, and in Iraq, you don’t.
While on Saddam Hussein’s home field, Rooke-Ley made a speech in which he lambasted the Bush administration’s War on Terror, which he said “is free-wheeling and unrestrained and will set us on a dangerous path of retaliation and mass destruction such as the world has never seen.” At the end of the trip, the delegation had the “extra-ordinary good fortune to meet with Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, an impressive articulate intellectual whose analysis of the political situation merits our attention.” When Sabri suggested that the reason the United States was considering war in Iraq was “number one, Iraq’s traditional support for the Palestinians and, two, oil,”
Professor Rooke-Ley nodded his agreement.50
Professors also gave aid and comfort to Saddam by providing him with excuses and moral equivocation to commit war crimes or kill Americans.
“We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression,” states International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s very clear,” he adds, “if you read all the press reports, they are going to devastate Baghdad, a metropolitan area of 5 million people. The Nuremberg Charter clearly says the wanton devastation of a city is a Nuremberg war crime.”51 By morally equating George Bush with Adolf Hitler, Boyle surely belongs in the category “America-hater.”
Professor Mark Lance of Georgetown University, said that US policy toward Iraq was “hypocrisy,” since America has committed the same crimes on a larger scale than Saddam Hussein. “The United States,” Lance argued, “has done more than any country historically to develop and spread technology of mass destruction . . . including nuclear [technology], biotechnology and nerve gas . . . including to Saddam long after his crimes had become known.”52
Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of law at the University of Southern California, wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he argued that the United States was hypocritical in protesting Iraq’s execution of prisoners of war, since America was detaining terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “The United States cannot expect other nations to treat our prisoners in accord with international law if we ignore it,” Chemerinsky wrote. He did not even bother to refute the claim that Iraq would be justified in violating international law regarding POWs.53 When radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt asked Chemerinsky if he realized that Iraq could use pieces like his to excuse their war crimes, Chemerinsky protested that Hewitt was questioning his loyalty. Chemerinsky refused to condemn Jane Fonda’s Hanoi trip to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War which resulted in the torture of US prisoners of war. Chemerinsky also refused to condemn a sign at a rally that read, “We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.”54
Professor Michael Ballou of Santa Rosa Junior College urged his students to think about assassinating President Bush. In his Summer 2003 course, he assigned his students the task of composing an e-mail message utilizing the phrase “kill the president.” The goal of the assignment, Ballou said, was “to bring our underlying fear of government into the open.” When one of his students actually sent the e-mail to Rep. Mike Thompson (D-California) and another told his parents, both the FBI and Secret Service showed up at the university. Ballou took shield behind the First Amendment, claiming that the words “kill the president” could be interpreted to mean someone other than President Bush.
Amazingly, Santa Rosa Junior College refused to fire Ballou for “unprofessional speech.” In fact, Janet McCulloch, incoming president of the college’s All Faculty Association, said that Ballou “has the right to say what he wants in the classroom,” although that liberty “doesn’t go to the point of asking students to jeopardize their futures.”55 Ballou defended himself this way: “I’m not going to take any flak from the 60 percent of the American people who don’t vote anyway. For them the President and the Presidency are already dead.”56 Any more questions about which president he was talking about?
The most blatant case of treachery emanated from Columbia University, where Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova told a crowd of students at a teach-in that “The only true heroes are those who find ways to help defeat the US military,” and stated that he “personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.” At Mogadishu, eighteen US servicemen were killed; De Genova is calling for the deaths of eighteen million Americans. “If we really believe that this war is criminal,” De Genova explained, “then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the US war machine.”57 De Genova deserves a one-way ticket out of this country he so despises.
“HOW DARE YOU CALL US UNPATRIOTIC?”
After all is said and done, many of these professors are just plain unpatriotic. It’s one thing to protest a war, but to demonize the president of the United States as another Hitler, to tell students to think about assassinating the president, to travel to enemy soil and criticize our government, to pray for the deaths of US soldiers, is un-American.
But just try saying that to professors’ faces. They go off the deep end if anyone so much as suggests that they dislike America, calling anyone who says so McCarthyistic, a witch hunter, a fascist, and a totalitarian to boot.
“To brand anti-war activism as anti-American is offensive and dangerously ant
i-democratic. Such attempts to silence dissent also do a profound disservice to our nation,” complains Professor Peter Cannavo of Hamilton College. “If it is ‘anti-American’ to raise these issues, then someone had better save our country from its ‘friends.’”58 “War time seems to make people feel that they can use patriotism as a stick,” mourns Professor Darlene Boroviak of Wheaton College. “It’s unfair to criticize people as being unpatriotic. They have the right to express different viewpoints.”59
“[It] is really a contradiction in saying that this is a war to liberate another country but people who are opposed at home are supposed to stifle their criticism,” concurs Professor Gerald Turkey of the University of Delaware.60 Criticism is most definitely not being stifled. Those of us who disagree with the anti-war activists have the same right of free speech as peaceniks do, and we can use it to criticize the peaceniks if we want.
“Patriotism is not a neutral term,” states Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin. “It comes with a history, and it’s been used as a weapon. I can always tell when somebody has exhausted his own thought process, because that’s when they call me unpatriotic and un-American.”61 Actually, the thought process doesn’t have to be exhausted before calling Professor Jensen unpatriotic. He is the same man who proclaimed weeks after September 11 that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were “no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism . . . that the US government has committed during my lifetime.”62
Professor Sheila Peters of Fisk University states, “I don’t think people who are antiwar are less patriotic than those who are pro-war. I just think they deal with issues facing their country in different ways.”63
Those few honest people in the anti-war movement know better. Professor Nicholas De Genova, the same professor who hoped for “a million Mogadishus,” admitted in a rare moment of truth: “Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live—a world where the US would have no place.”64 Straight from the horse’s . . . mouth.
