Andrew Rubin* argues that the only chance of enabling Iraq to realise its human capabilities is by maintaining a separation between the university and political society Among the many disastrous effects of the comprehensively brazen and unconscionable destruction of Iraqi civil society by the United States and its coalition of allies is the terrifying exercise of control, intimidation, and even the murder of Iraqi intellectuals, professors, lecturers and teachers that have become more or less systematic since the US-led invasion of Iraq began in May 2003. Under the US Occupation, governed by a body called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), US military officials dismissed many Iraqi intellectuals from their university positions on often spurious grounds; and a surprisingly large number found themselves the victims of acts of assassination. According to the Union of Iraqi Lecturers and other estimates by professors in Iraq, roughly 200 have been killed and many more dismissed often on dubious claims by US forces and authorities acting on the behalf of the CPA. Intellectuals, professors, lecturers and teachers are being assassinated on an almost regular basis. The 200 or so professors assassinated to date include: Mohamed Al-Rawi, president of Baghdad University (27 July, 2003); Dr Abdul-Latif Al- Mayah, a professor of political science at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University (late January 2003); Dr Nafaa Aboud, a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Baghdad; Dr Sabri Al-Bayati, a geographer at the University of Baghdad; Dr Falah Al-Dulaimi, assistant dean of college at Mustansiriya University; Dr Hissam Sharif, department of history of the University of Baghdad; Professor Wajih Mahjoub of the College of Physical Education; Professor Sabah Mahmoud, ex-dean of the Education College in Mustansiriya University, Professor Abdul-Jabbar Mustafa, head of the Politics Department in Al- Mosul University, Dr Layla Abdul-Jabbar, dean of the Faculty of Law in Mosul and her husband; and, among others, Dr Ali Abdul-Hussein Jabok from the College of Political Science at the University of Baghdad. To date no investigations by the CPA have taken place; not a single arrest has been made in spite of the authority's penchant for rounding up young Iraqi men and treating them in barbaric ways in Hussein's former prison of Abu Graib, a sick and ironic historical twist not lost on any Iraqis. A US Defense Department spokesman, when asked recently about the assassination of Iraqi professors, dismissed the matter as simply "obscure". The Iraqi interim government, installed and hand-picked by the United States, has done nothing and said nothing about it, and with the exception of a few courageous professors, such as Professor Saad Jawad, a senior professor of Political Science at the University of Baghdad, very few are willing to speak out publicly. When a former doctoral student of Jawad's was killed at Mosul University, Jawad's colleagues refused to sign a petition to go on strike because the political forces now active in Iraqi society are becoming more fractured, more factional, more sectarian, and more ethnically absolutist. One university president has been murdered, several deans have been killed, and what is most striking is that many of those killed since the occupation began were trained not in the sciences, but in fields like the soft sciences and the humanities. In other words, they were not being murdered by Hussein loyalists for knowing something about a former or possible weapons of mass destruction programme. Instead they were and are professors of subjects such as French, literature, history, and law, who teach and write within the domain of the humanities, where the discussion about conflict can be converted into the conditions for reconciliation, where students can not only learn about themselves, but also about others, and where the content of what students are taught need not and should not or ever be controlled by forces outside of the university. Who is actually responsible for these assassinations is the subject of a large amount of speculation. Some have alleged it is the Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, which obviously has an interest in a weak and possibly theocratic Iraq -- the better to declare Arabs as undemocratically minded terrorists ("It's not personal; it's business," says one professor in Baghdad of Mossad's possible motives); others, such as Denis Halliday, a former assistant secretary- general of the United Nations have wondered aloud whether this is the work of anti-secular and fundamentalist forces in society -- all the better to recruit students to the madras and the tenets of Islamic fundamentalism; others have pointed to militias like the sort commanded by the Pentagon's once favoured Ahmad Chalabi; and still others have alleged that these are the activities of disgruntled students, acts of revenge and grade fury, as it were, as the entire civil society is in one way or another armed with weapons that the US had sold to Iraq without reservation less than two decades ago. Part of the process of dismissing Iraqi intellectuals, professors, and lecturers was known as de-Baathification, and with the exception of the few returning exiles, the former Baath Party members constitute nearly an absolute majority of professors in post-war Iraq. All professors, if they wished to keep their job under the Hussein regime, were required to join the Baath Party regardless of their political views. Yet the process of the US repression of academics was less about protecting the academic freedom of professors who joined the party simply out of political and economic necessity than it was about a kind of resurgence of American McCarthyism abroad. Indeed, one has to wonder whether there is a concerted effort to undermine a secular democratic foundation in Iraq's universities when the Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is a former Baathist and murderer himself. According to Robert Dreyfus, writing in The American Prospect, $3 billion of the $87 billion going to Iraq has been allotted to fund covert CIA paramilitary organisations in Iraq, which, if the CIA's historical record is to be consulted, is likely to include extrajudicial killings and assassinations. Not that the curriculum under Hussein was ever a source of a radical renewal that could actually provide the conditions for the emergence of a secular, moral and democratic leadership. Known as "Arab Culture and Socialism", the four-year required undergraduate course was a brain numbing, chauvinistic and hyper-nationalist occasion for the unrestrained celebration of everything Baath, elevating the writings of Baath Party theoreticians to the canonical heights of the early 20th century Pan-Arabist work of George Antonius's The Arab Awakening. Like many other universities in the Arab and developing world, universities were institutions fundamental to the reinvention of national identity after years of rule and colonisation by the Ottomans, and then the British and French. After the 1952 Revolution, for example, the Egyptian curriculum underwent a process of Arabisation. In 1962, Arabic was legalised in Algeria and could be uttered for the first time outside the walls of mosques in the former French colony. At Palestinian universities such as Bir Zeit, the institution has assumed a critical role of defending itself against Israel's ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and its repeated closure of Palestinian universities. But just as these universities were and remain extensions of the national security state and the process of consolidation of national identity, we must not overlook that United States during the Cold War manipulated and funded subjects like Area Studies and widely influenced the development of the fields such as "Sovietology" and even Comparative Literature under National Defense Education Act of 1958. Yet in spite of the tyranny exercised over the totality of Iraqi society by Saddam Hussein, the university classroom was, under Hussein (as some professors often claim) a relatively autonomous space of learning and instruction, where professors, lectures and students could criticize quite a bit, including the government, so long as they never mentioned a word about Saddam Hussein personally or his two sons. Yet to this day the textbooks retain virtually the same content; they have been altered only by eliminating the images of Hussein and his sons. No matter who is directly responsible for the grave peril facing Iraqi institutions of learning and its educators, the situation seriously threatens the emergence of a secular, moral and democratic leadership arising from within Iraq, let alone from an official's desk in Washington, DC. If such a society is to emerge from the scars of years of sanctions, and the rubble from a remorseless and mendaciously justified war, the intellectuals are among the best and, in my opinion, the only chance of enabling Iraq to realise its human capabilities. Otherwise, the US and its allies will continue arrogating themselves the somehow ordained right to determine the form that Iraqi universities and knowledge should assume. Indeed the separation between the university and political society needs to be maintained, not conflated or reduced to one or the other under the duress of politics and the impingements of imperial rule. * The writer is an assistant professor of English literature at Georgetown University, and the director of the International Coalition of Academics Against Occupation <www.icaao.org.
