Immediately, on the twenty second anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, key architects and commanders of this monstrous battle crime, from Condoleezza Rice to David Petraeus, sit comfortably in comfortable positions at high American universities.
On the identical time, the overseers of the continuing U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment and siege on Gaza, thought-about a genocide by human rights teams like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are already settling into equally fancy appointments at elite colleges. Only recently, Biden administration officers Brett McGurk and Jake Sullivan accepted gigs at Harvard, with Sullivan’s professorship named after none apart from former Secretary of State and Nationwide Safety Adviser Henry Kissinger. Each Sullivan and McGurk have been key officers who carried out Biden’s Gaza insurance policies, and McGurk’s work stretches again to the Iraq occupation.
Many of those universities — Harvard to Yale, Columbia to Stanford — have made statements round injustices such as Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, however have largely stayed quiet round Israel’s destruction of Gaza and scholasticide in opposition to Palestinian universities. These administrations have additionally aggressively repressed college students who protested ongoing atrocities in opposition to Palestinians and demanded that universities break ties with Israel’s U.S.-backed battle machine that oversees occupation and apartheid. The college response to dissent across the U.S.-Israel battle on Palestine has been much more iron-fisted than something seen in the course of the Iraq Warfare.
“That is the Palestine exception,” Van Gosse, co-founder of Historians Towards the Warfare, which shaped in 2003 in protest of the Iraq Warfare, and present co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy, advised Truthout.
Nonetheless, Gosse and others who mobilized academia to oppose the Iraq Warfare are joining a brand new era of pupil activists to push again in opposition to college complicity within the genocide of Palestinians.
Anniversary of a Warfare Crime
The world over, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is broadly seen as an ethical abomination, made attainable by a marketing campaign of deceit by the George W. Bush administration, which falsely claimed that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction as pretext for an illegal invasion.
The European Middle for Constitutional and Human Rights labelled the invasion a “crime” and stated the U.S. “dedicated battle crimes together with massacres and torture on an enormous scale.” Amnesty Worldwide emphasized the “gross human rights violations and critical violations of worldwide humanitarian legislation perpetrated by the United States-led Coalition” in the course of the invasion and occupation, which formally led to 2011.
Gosse, a professor emeritus at Franklin and Marshall Faculty who taught lessons on the legal guidelines of battle, advised Truthout that, “Anybody linked to the Iraq Warfare is accountable for the primary crime of war, which is aggression.”
“For those who make battle with out a casus belli, it’s a battle crime,” he stated.
Key architects and overseers of the second U.S. battle on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious instructing appointments and profitable talking gigs at U.S. universities.
Brown College’s Prices of Warfare venture estimates that 315,000 Iraqis, overwhelmingly civilians, might have died in the course of the invasion and occupation, although that is probably an undercount. Round 9.2 million Iraqis — 37 % of Iraq’s prewar inhabitants — might have been displaced. All this got here after years of devastating sanctions, a few of which have been carried out as early as 1990, one 12 months earlier than the primary U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The U.S. occupation oversaw torture and massacres of Iraqis and led to huge sectarian violence and a ravaging of the nation’s instructional system and public well being. The battle and occupation upended the area politically, resulting in a whole bunch of 1000’s of extra deaths and hundreds of thousands extra displacements.
Iraq Warfare Architects Flood Universities
And but, key architects and overseers of the second U.S. battle on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious instructing appointments and profitable talking gigs at U.S. universities.
Condoleezza Rice, a war hawk who served as nationwide safety adviser in the course of the 2003 invasion and later as secretary of state, has loved a comfortable relationship with universities since she left authorities.
Immediately, she serves because the Denning Professor in World Enterprise and the Economic system on the Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise, in addition to the director of the Hoover Establishment, the conservative suppose tank at Stanford. Rice has additionally loved distinguished talking invites at universities like Pepperdine, Purdue and the College of Minnesota, the place she reportedly took $150,000 for the gig.
Few authorities officers have been extra aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith, the previous undersecretary of protection for coverage. In 2006, simply after he left the Bush administration, Feith was handed, with out a college vote, a instructing place on the College of Overseas Service at Georgetown.
The transfer “set off a college kerfuffle,” famous The New York Times, “with 72 professors, directors and graduate college students signing a letter of protest,” with “some going so far as to accuse him of battle crimes.”
David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the course of the invasion earlier than turning into the highest U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and later CIA chief, has additionally been warmly welcomed into academia over the previous decade or so.
In 2013, Petraeus was appointed to a visiting place at Metropolis College of New York. Set to obtain a whopping $150,000 to show a three-hour weekly class, Petraeus later forwent the fee after it grew to become a public scandal, along with his appointment facing protests.
However this was just the start of Petraeus’s educational invites. Across the identical time, he joined the College of Southern California (USC) college as a Choose Widney Professor, a title “reserved for eminent people from the humanities, sciences, professions, enterprise and neighborhood and nationwide management,” in response to a USC statement. Petraeus held the place for six years; USC was hush about his wage.
Immediately, Petraeus continues to take pleasure in talking engagements from Rice University to the College of Arizona to Princeton, and he stays a Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale College’s Jackson College of World Affairs. Yale additionally served as a house for Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw particular operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2022, he held a senior fellow place on the Ivy League faculty.
Harvard Welcomes Iraq and Gaza Warfare Accomplices
Petraeus has additionally been a mainstay at Harvard College, serving for six years as a senior fellow on the Belfer Middle for Science and Worldwide Affairs at Harvard Kennedy College.
As journalist Michael Massing noted, the Belfer Middle is a “digital arm of the military-intelligence complicated,” with a slew of high leaders and fellows tied to the Pentagon and weapons firms.
Few authorities officers have been extra aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith. Feith was handed, with out a college vote, a instructing place at Georgetown.
In 2023, Meghan L. O’Sullivan became the pinnacle of the Belfer Middle. Based on a 2006 profile in The New York Occasions, O’Sullivan was considered one of Bush’s high advisers on Iraq and Afghanistan, with colleagues saying she was “instrumental in shaping Mr. Bush’s views,” and “essentially the most senior official engaged on these nations full time on the White Home.” She additionally spent over a 12 months in Baghdad as an aide to Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority, making him Iraq’s de facto ruler in the course of the early years of the occupation. Bremer single handedly carried out broadly reviled free-market reforms and privatization schemes whereas in cost.
In 2022, O’Sullivan, who was already a professor on the Harvard Kennedy College, confronted protests from antiwar activists for her place as a board director of weapons large Raytheon — a lucrative place she held beginning in 2017 and solely stepped down from in early 2023 after being appointed because the Belfer Middle director.
Harvard additionally simply announced that former Biden Nationwide Safety Adviser Jake Sullivan, who helped oversee U.S. backing for Israel’s siege of Gaza, would be the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Follow of Statecraft and World Order, affiliated with the Belfer Middle.
Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023, is broadly seen as a war criminal for his backing of atrocities in Southeast Asia, Latin America and East Timor all through the Nineteen Seventies. Kissinger himself was welcomed by universities till his dying, although he often faced protests when talking at campuses.
Gosse remembers protests in opposition to Kissinger’s graduation addresses within the Nineteen Eighties. “There’s actually no nice document of establishments recognizing the criminality of the architects of those horrible wars,” he advised Truthout.
Moreover, Harvard just lately announced that Brett McGurk would be a part of the Belfer Middle as a senior fellow.
McGurk was Joe Biden’s coordinator for the Center East and North Africa and one of many administration’s key advisers on Israel’s battle on Gaza who was deeply concerned with negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Reporting by HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed means that McGurk’s foremost concern was reaching Saudi-Israeli “normalization” on the expense of Palestinian human rights.
McGurk additionally served within the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, the place he strongly influenced U.S. coverage in Iraq. McGurk has been criticized for his shut support of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One diplomat called McGurk “a consummate operator in Washington” however noticed “no signal that he was fascinated with Iraqis or Iraq as a spot stuffed with actual folks.”
Harrison Mann, a Harvard Kennedy College graduate who resigned in Could 2024 from the Protection Intelligence Company in protest of U.S. coverage in Gaza, lambasted Harvard’s hiring of McGurk, who he known as “an enthusiastic and influential advocate for the U.S. army assist that sustained Israel’s brutal marketing campaign in Gaza.”
“Hiring McGurk is a declaration that being get together to a litany of battle crimes isn’t a deal-breaker at Harvard,” wrote Mann.
Campus Ties to Militarism Are Nothing New
Shut ties between U.S. universities and the battle machine are nothing new. The military-industrial complicated grew interdependently with the increase in increased training after World Warfare II and into the Chilly Warfare.
Campus protests immediately in opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this custom of difficult college ties to the battle machine.
From Stanford to MIT, all through the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, protection {dollars} and company cash poured into analysis labs. Key architects of the U.S. battle on Vietnam and Southeast Asia like McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger held prestigious roles at Harvard earlier than getting into the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Within the late Nineteen Sixties, nevertheless, mass pupil uprisings throughout campuses started to openly challenge the tight alliance between universities and the battle business in the course of the U.S. battle on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Militant protests in opposition to firms like Dow Chemical — maker of napalm — erupted at dozens of campuses. Scholar actions from Berkeley to Madison to Columbia engaged in constructing occupations and mapped out their colleges’ ties to company energy and the battle machine.
Campus protests immediately in opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this custom of difficult college ties to the battle machine.
Dozens of universities and their research labs, from Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon to MIT and the University of Southern California, obtain billions in Pentagon funding. College students from Columbia to Cornell have protested in opposition to the shut ties between weapons producers who provide Israel’s annihilation marketing campaign and their very own college boards that welcome representatives of those weapons producers as trustees and donors.
The Palestine Exception
Within the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. lecturers determined to withstand. Dozens of professors got here collectively on the January 2003 convention of the American Historic Affiliation (AHA) to kind a brand new group, Historians Towards the Warfare (HAW).
Gosse, who co-founded HAW, advised Truthout that the group’s mission was “to prepare historians to talk out and be lively on campus and inside the bigger motion” in opposition to the battle.
HAW members attended protests, held conferences and teach-ins, and wrote op-eds. On the 2007 AHA assembly they efficiently passed a resolution calling for the tip of the Iraq battle.
Round 2014, Gosse says, HAW began focusing extra on Palestine, forming a Palestine-Israel Working Group. The flip triggered “a little bit of controversy,” he stated, and the teams’ efforts to “censure Israel’s manifold violations of educational freedom” at AHA conferences over the subsequent few years have been defeated.
After Trump’s first election, the group renamed itself Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD) and took up fights in opposition to right-wing “tradition wars.” They nonetheless manage panels at AHA conferences that fill the room.
It was HPAD that introduced the decision on the January 2025 AHA assembly opposing scholasticide in Gaza that prevailed with an awesome 428 to 88 vote, solely to be vetoed by AHA management days later. In response, HPAD and the Palestine Historians Group drafted a letter signed by over 1,900 historians, together with 4 former AHA presidents, that the AHA management council will talk about in a March 20 assembly. The letter requires the AHA management council to rescind its veto of the Decision to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.
For Gosse, who co-chairs HPAD, the contrasts between the wars on Iraq and Palestine are placing. Some college administrations supported debate over the Iraq Warfare, he says. There was a way that the Iraq Warfare was “one thing actually essential that we should always discuss,” says Gosse, which can be attributed to the “lengthy enjoying out of the Vietnam syndrome” — a catchphrase that refers to widespread skepticism towards U.S. army innovations within the a long time following the Vietnam Warfare.
However immediately, many of those identical college administrations shun and repress dialogue of injustice in opposition to Palestinians.
“You hit a wall in the event you problem Israel,” says Gosse. “It’s been a 3rd rail that has severely restricted the power of individuals to discuss the fully unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories and the truth that Israel has been, for a really very long time, an apartheid state.”
Gosse laments the “horrific capitulation and worry” amongst college administrations proper now and the “full destruction of college governance.” He known as Columbia College’s actions across the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil “disgusting” and “completely shameful.”
“They’re debasing themselves,” he stated. “They’ve taken all of the progress made on educational freedom and free speech on campus and thrown it within the gutter inside just a few months.”
Khalil, a authorized everlasting U.S. resident who’s Palestinian, is a current graduate from Columbia College who participated in campus protests in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. He was arrested on March 8 by ICE and transferred to Louisiana, the place the Trump administration is attempting to deport him for collaborating in pro-Palestine protests.
A federal choose temporarily halted the deportation order, and there was an outpouring of support for Khalil and outrage on the administration’s brazen assaults on free speech rights. Khalil’s arrest follows many months of crackdowns on and criticisms against pupil protesters beneath the Biden administration, which the Trump administration has straight intensified.
Because the U.S. enablers of catastrophic wars from Iraq to Gaza proceed to search out properties in the identical universities that repress dissent round Palestine, attitudes past the heights of energy are shifting. Regardless of the final end result of the AHA scholasticide decision, Gosse says, the push for it has been “an incredible success.”
“Essentially the most venerable realized society within the U.S. has been compelled totally and fully to confront the scholasticide in Gaza,” he stated.
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