Word began to trickle out of Baghdad in mid-April 2003 that the Iraqi National Library and Archives and the library of the Ministry of Holy Endowments and Religious Affairs (al-Awqaf) had been burned and looted during the paroxysm of aggravated mayhem that followed the collapse of the Baathist regime. Soon, it became clear that in addition to the damage to those libraries, universities, research centers and private institutions had also been harmed or destroyed, and that additional elements of Iraq’s rich cultural heritage in the form of historic buildings, musical archives and contemporary art were at risk. These were moments of deep and profound sadness that ultimately gave way to conversations about ways to work to assess, rebuild and restore what had been lost.

As these conversations continued, several of us – primarily a group of historians of the contemporary Arab Middle East from Germany, France, Jordan and the US – decided to travel to Baghdad to catalog the extent of the damage to institutions of higher learning and cultural production. In our planning that an exclusive focus on libraries and burnt archives was somehow a sterile exercise and instead, what also was required was a record of the needs of Iraq’s academic and intellectual community as it rebuilds itself in the face of a generation of brutish rule by Saddam Hussein, a decade of debilitating UN sanctions, a brief and humiliating war, and an open-ended American-led military occupation.

The larger goal of the group would be outlined in the letter of introduction we received from Lisa Anderson, past-president of the Middle East Studies Association. We translated that letter into Arabic and it proved a tremendous asset in conversations with Iraqis, UN officials and American government and military representations.

In the words of the letter, we went to:

A) Establish contacts with Iraqi colleagues in the local academic community;

B) Assess with their help the current condition of libraries, archives and universities;

C) set the bases for future cooperation between international academic communities, institutions and professional associations and their Iraqi colleagues and their institutions.

Following our 9-day visit to Baghdad (22-30 June 2003) we published the report of our findings on-line as “Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Iraq.”^[1] The 30-page .pdf document is still the only comprehensive independent assessment of academic conditions and intellectual life in Baghdad. We saw the report as a beginning and a road map for later groups. It was based on interviews with Army officers, civilian administrators and advisers from Britain, the US and Italy, but mostly was drawn from conversations with fellow Iraqi academics, many of whom traveled to our hotel, putting themselves at risk to spend time with us. Among the most notable of the people who help us was the AUB-trained Iraqi historian Alya Sousa, whom we spoke to first in Jordan and whose web of contacts proved invaluable. Dr. Sousa, a grandmother, perished along with UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 others in the August 2003 car bombing of UN Headquarters at the Canal Hotel on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Various organizations around the world, most notably H-NET (USA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (France), hosted copies of the report on their websites and allowed it to be accessed for free. We estimate that it has been downloaded over 2,000 times. One encouraging sign was the number of times individuals whose webaddress ended in “.gov” pointed their browsers to the report. It was even called a “must read” by an anonymous source in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. And as the report took a critical stance towards the underlying ethos and various policies of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, the civilian face of the American military occupational administration, it was also criticized and denounced, and moreover left unacknowledged even by those who had downloaded the report. And in a curious development, an unauthorized Arabic translation of the report appeared in the October 2003 edition of the journal al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi and was reprinted in al-Iraq - al-ghazu, al-ihtilal, al-muqawama: shuhadat min kharaj al-watan al-arabi [Iraq - The War, the Occupation, the Resistance: Observations from Outside the Arab World] (Beirut: 2003: 271-98).

We intended the report for the international academic community writ large. And as we had hoped, it has been used as a starting point for policy discussions at colleges, universities, and professional organizations worldwide. Subsequently all of the authors have been called upon to aid in various education and humanitarian initiatives and each have become involved in various projects, like the Harvard University-Simmons College program for professional library training for Iraqi librarians.

But we also had other reasons for going. Many of us sensed that while there had been a tremendous international outcry for the archaeological museums and the ancient past of Mesopotamia – things that fit more neatly into the trajectory of the heritage of “our Western Civilization,” a similar outcry for that past most present in the lives of contemporary Iraqis, the heritage of the Islamic, Ottoman, Arab – colonial and post-colonial periods was absent altogether. Moreover, this absence extended to any discussions of the humanities, history, and architecture. As if to confirm our suspicions that the part of Iraq’s past most worthy of protection and promotion would be the most ancient and distant from a Muslim and Arab present, a significant portion of the first of five USAID grants totaling $20.5 million for joint programs between American Universities and colleges and Iraqi higher education was for the training of archaeologists and the teaching of Assyrian. This is not a criticism of the international archaelogical community – who have indeed risen to the task and whose efforts on behalf of Iraq’s ancient past are tremendous – rather it highlights how difficult a task it is to generate international sympathy or support for Islamic Art or more contemporary aspects of Muslim and Arab cultural heritage.

Also in our minds was an attempt to capture the imagination of our colleagues – both in and out of Middle Eastern studies; we wanted to show them that it could be done in the hopes that others would follow. We planned the visit at a time of relative security however, and that moment has certainly past. Our modest efforts were doubly important against the backdrop of the broader “criminalization” of mainstream Middle East studies in the US in the lead-up to war. The vilification and ridiculing of professionals in various disciplines as somehow unpatriotic and treasonous for opposing military action – and the generalized failure of policy makers to listen to almost unanimously dire warnings of broader implications of that course of action – led to a sense of disenfranchisement and anger. My sense was that an effort to contribute constructively to the rebuilding of Iraq by making back-channel contacts with Iraqi intellectuals and academics, while at the same time remaining at a critical distance from the CPA and the Department of Defense, would confront the calumnies leveled against America’s Middle East studies community as being “disengaged” and “unresponsive” to national exigencies and the human rights needs of Iraq’s peoples. In these efforts, we have been less successful – especially as the violence continued to escalate in the course of the year and as a consequence of systematic attacks on intellectuals and writers seen as too closely collaborating with the American occupational authorities. Moreover, the Fulbright Program, which we had hoped could serve as a neutral and non-partisan resource, has since been harnessed by the Reagan-era political appointee and former US Ambassador to Yemen, Joseph Ghougassian, to the broader public relations offensive of the CPA.^[2]

And a final reason for going was a strong sense that stories coming out of Iraq were being told, for the most part by people ill-prepared to do so; individuals whose sense of Iraqi, Arab, and Islamic cultures was shaped by a narrow partisan political agenda, and in some cases a racist and Orientalist discourse. This was reinforced recently by the discovery that the the CPA’s press office is peopled primarily by Republican party activists, lead by Dan Senor, himself a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) intern, as well.

As we were putting the final touches on the report, the late Edward Said published an essay that encapsulates this sense:

the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and “others” has found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow....In the process the uncountable sediments of history, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.^[3]

I will always associate this war with the passing of Edward Said.

As we crossed the boundary between the normal detachment and intellectual indifference scholars – a phenomenon particularly more pronounced and rewarded amongst historians – and the realm of humanitarian action, we did so to fulfill the burden placed on our collective shoulders by Said. We also did it to meet our responsibility to assert the dignity and humanity of the people who are our colleagues in Iraq. When I was once asked why did you go? I responded that if the situation were reversed, I would hope someone would come to see how we were doing.

How were they doing in summer of last year? In brief, what we found was astonishing: almost all state institutions, universities, libraries and research institutes were harmed, although in some cases the looting and destruction was limited to the theft of computers and other easily replaceable items. Looters and vandals damaged classroom environments and research spaces; even in places not physically destroyed, they stole chairs, tables, blackboards, windows and doors. Items of unique value are gone. And not just old Ottoman archives, historic manuscripts, books and documents, but also student records and transcripts – the mundane trappings of everyday life in a modern educational system.

What was also clear to us is that Iraq’s structures of teaching, learning and research not only suffered substantially after the war, but continue to face the cumulative effects of two decades of mismanagement, Baathist cultural politics, and regime paranoia. This has accelerated since the early 1990s when the state took extreme austerity measures as a response to UN sanctions and the fall in oil revenues. As a consequence, many of these institutions are frozen in terms of development somewhere in the late 1980s. For these, the looting was just a last humiliating act in a longer process of erosion that transformed what was perhaps the most elaborate and well-developed higher educational and research system in the Arab world into a pale shadow of its former self.

We surveyed conditions at three campuses in the capital: Baghdad University, al-Mustansiriyya University, and al-Nahrayn (Two Rivers) University, formerly Saddam University. The universities share many of the problems brought by the war and its aftermath, namely safety issues, unreliable water and electricity and transportation. Moreover, these institutions still face fundamental problems from before the fall of the regime, namely, being cut off from all substantive international contact for much of the last two decades. In real terms, this meant a suspension of subscriptions to academic journals, library acquisition, and travel abroad for faculty members and students. Most fundamentally, freedom of thought and expression and academic independence, were severely limited throughout the period.

In terms of the most pressing needs, universities, students and their families have organized buses and carpools for transportation. Moreover, the low level of student and faculty absenteeism impressed us at a time of rampant insecurity. Nevertheless, due to actual or imagined threats to personal safety, women faculty members and students have found it increasingly difficult to come to school. This structural disadvantage far more than the much-vaunted Islamist profile at the universities may impair the access to higher education that Iraqi women faculty and students have traditionally enjoyed. During the several hours we spent on the campuses in Baghdad, there seemed to be little difference between the immediate ante bellum period and now in terms of religious or social pressure on women. While women have held positions of prominence in Iraqi higher education and female students make-up at least 50% of the student population, female faculty members expressed concern that this role has changed for the worse over the last decade and they openly worry that it may continue to decline.

Despite the lack of tables and chairs, examination booklets and even chalk, the normal rhythm of the academic year had returned to the city’s campuses. Students, excited and happy to be at school, had set up for themselves makeshift cafeterias where young men and women gathered, talked, debated and enjoyed the company of one another. The students were all well dressed – a major accomplishment in the heat and without running water. The resourcefulness and adaptability of Iraqi faculty and students was readily in evidence.

What was also clear to us at the time, and is still the case is that without independent budgets or endowments and with the presence of US military personnel and weapons on their campuses, the universities of Iraq have been placed in a subordinate and wholly dependent position.  The United States, as dominant partner in the CPA, is using this preeminent position to control the shape of higher education, and is taking an active stance towards staffing, curriculum and admissions.

We counseled therefore, that American universities and consortia eschew any cooperation with the CPA unless and until a sovereign and independent Iraq is part of the equation; while this is an imperfect suggestion for an even worse situation, waiting until Iraqis have greater freedom of action in choosing amongst educational initiatives, international partnering and complete control of budgets will lessen the potentially deleterious effects of collaboration – for Iraqis and Americas – at this time. The very integrity and independence of American academia is at risk otherwise. This is not intended as an act of protest against the war, far from it; rather, as we contended in the report:

In the current formulation, aid, development and reform all first must pass through the prism of American national interests in Iraq and the Middle East.  Similarly, if the security situation in Iraq deteriorates and the American occupation continues, reform programs closely allied to these American interests will prove problematic and a focus for resistance.  This fact should be part of the thinking of institutions seeking to cooperate with US government initiatives in Iraq. These organizations should be conscious of the fact while they may consider themselves as distinct from the US government, disinterested and benevolent, Iraqis will conflate them with the occupation and see them as complicit actors in the forwarding of American interests.

An exemplary token of American interests taking root in Iraqi higher education was the appointment of John Agresto, as senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education. “Senior Advisors” play a paternalistic role in the CPA akin to colonial administrators of the inter-war French and British Mandates and exert a tremendous amount of power over Iraqi institutions and agencies through the control of budgets, security and as gatekeepers to the upper echelons of the Department of Defense; with the hand over of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30, 2004, American diplomats, for all intents and purposes will play a similar role.  Prior to going to Iraq, Agresto was the president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an institution known for its Eurocentric “Great Books” curriculum and he now runs his own educational consulting firm, Agresto Consultants. Agresto has no training in Middle Eastern society or culture and no experience in the region, although he has admitted, “All the West is indebted to Arab and Islamic culture for preserving the core Greek texts of the liberal arts when, here, they had fallen more or less out of memory.”^[4] He served briefly as interim chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to which he was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Along with William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current Vice President Dick Cheney, Agresto was one of the leading right-wing figures in the “culture wars” of the 1980s.

Agresto returned from Iraq in June to address the graduating seniors of Samford University, a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated institution in Alabama. While he admitted that the CPA had failed to rebuild Iraq’s university system, he explained that the US Congress and the international academic community were primarily responsible for this failure. Nevertheless, among his accomplishments he cited his central role in the founding of the American Liberal Arts University of Iraq in Arbil, a city in the northern Kurdish-controlled part of the country and a new Center for Democracy. When queried by a reporter from the Associated Press whether his complete lack of expertise in Middle Eastern society and culture had contributed to the broader failure in Iraq, he demurred, noting: “You don’t need that to see that they need chairs.” He will permanently leave Iraq June 18, 2004.^[5]