John Agresto on Iraq & America

[Note: John Agresto, who's contributed to this blog before, was kind enough to share with us a commencement address he gave on May 22 at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. He was at that time still serving as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq. He is also featured in a front-page story in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription). As you'll see, he emerged from Iraq cautiously optimistic that we'll succeed, but he sees many difficulties down the road ahead. The opportunity for a liberal education that broadens intellectual and moral horizons is clearly much needed in Iraq, and we shouldn't be naive about the enormity of the task. A more liberal Iraq won't be Iowa, but it won't be a brutal land run by murderous thugs who invade their neighbors and threaten the region's stability, either.

This is the first half of his address. I'll post the second half tomorrow. Winfield Myers]

A LOT OF WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA
I LEARNED IN IRAQ
John Agresto, Ph.D.

Let me tell you a story - a true story. Soon after I got to Iraq, I befriended a young Iraqi working for the Americans as a clerk. He had an undergraduate degree in pharmacy, but he quit pharmacy to work with us. He asked me for a favor - could I help his younger sister switch from one program to another at her university. This seems like the easiest request; but in Iraq, where everything is regulated and regimented, it verges on the impossible. Still, after many phone calls and some begging, I managed to get her sister transferred to the program of her choice - computer science.

Well, in this young man’s eyes I was both the symbol of American power and American goodness. (Remember, all I did was make a few phone calls.)

A week later he visits me again, with a report. He was trying, he said, to be like an American: he gave a poor man begging on the street some money, and he gave a ride to a mother struggling to get her kids to school. How, I asked, did this make him like an American? It did because, for the first time in over 25 years, he personally worked for the good of people he didn’t know.

This is, in many ways, the character of Americans. Despite all the talk about American self-interest, American materialism and consumerism, the deep truth is that Americans have hearts of gold, they go out of their way to help. We are, despite all the glib media babble, the most generous nation on earth, bar none.

This acting from the heart may not be, always, the wisest policy. Let’s not forget that we have slogans that warn us against it - “Nice guys finish last,” we say. Or, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Or, may favorite, “It’s not the earth the meek inherit but the dirt.” But, still, the truth is we are, as Americans, incapable of acting otherwise. This is why we should not hold back in condemning the sadistic and perverted abuses we have seen in Abu Ghraib prison: this is behavior unworthy of Americans and a perversion of what it means to be American.

In thinking about why we are this way, this generous way, I sometimes think our countrymen gloss over what a difference Christianity has made. Consider just the story of the Good Samaritan. With that one story we began to see strangers as neighbors. We were told to expand the narrowness of the Ten Commandments - where we are instructed not to covet our neighbor’s goods or our neighbor’s wife and not to be a false witness against our neighbor - that is, against another member of our tribe or sect - and start to see all people as our neighbors. And we try.

I’m reminded of the collapse of the twin towers: when everyone was running, frightened, down the stairs, there were hundreds of men - policemen, firemen - running up the stairs to save their neighbors - neighbors they had never met. And they died. We have to remember that goodness and success do not always follow.

Why did I go to Iraq? Why, after this, am I going back? Not because I wanted to fight to topple the tyrant Saddam. I’m not in the military - that was something they had to do. Not to find weapons of mass destruction - I have, I assure you, no interest in them, and wouldn’t know what one looked like on a bet.

No, I went because I was asked to help re-construct the nearly 70 universities and vocational schools that cover the map of Iraq. I’m not a brave person; I’m not a daring person; and I’m not a young person - but I am an American, and I think that explains what I’m doing and why more than any psychology.

The Iraqis, I must say, do not understand this. They have, by and large, no conception of going out of one’s way for others just because they are others. I think all of them, in one way or another, think we’re there for oil. One of the deans of the College of Science at Baghdad University, went so far as to tell me he believed that we drove the planes into the World Trade Center ourselves so we could blame it on the Arabs and come and take their oil. When I told him we could buy all the oil in the world for what we would be spending in Iraq, he changed his mind and said we were doing it to make slaves out of Arabs because we weren’t allowed to have blacks as slaves anymore. He was very satisfied with this explanation. At least, to him, it made more sense than going to strangers in order to “help.”

Now, my academic field is not humanitarian studies or sociology but political science. And I’m afraid you are all waiting to ask me, “Will we succeed in Iraq?” And I’ve told you these stories in order to let you know that we may not. Charitable intentions do not, as I’ve said, ensure success. If this were a war for oil, there is no doubt we’d win it - but a war for the liberation of Iraqis and the future security of a democratic Middle East - well, that might be over the long run a bit too abstract and high-minded a goal even for Americans. Moreover – and more importantly -- to win in Iraq might depend more on Iraqis than on us: and that we have little power over. I’m not saying we will not be successful - only that I think we have had too easy-going a view of what it takes to forge democratic and free countries.

Let me put it this way. We Americans are a fully democratic people. We govern our elections by the calendar, not by the demands of the party in power; we turn over our government from party to party without even a thought of bloodshed or fighting; we respect the rule of law even when it hurts us; we defend a free press even though we know the damage it can and does do. When pressed, we easily say that “Yes, everyone should live in freedom, every country should be a democracy, a place where the people rule and not some thugs or tyrants or landlords.” We think, in brief, that democracy is the natural way people should live. We think, I’m afraid to say, that democracy is easy.

But, I’m afraid to say, tyranny is easy. Rule by the rich, or by demagogues, or by thugs and hooligans is easy. Rule by democracy is hard. It takes thousands of ingredients - tyranny takes so few.

Let me go back to my story, the story of getting the young woman’s course of study changed. What she would study for four years of university and, therefore, what she would be and all she would really know was decided by a test she took in high school. She had already been segregated in high school into the science and technology track because she was smart. Others, deemed less intelligent, would study “culture” - literature and history and the like, or, if less promising still, vocational arts. Now, once in college, she will learn little more than computer science. She will become a mini-expert in her field. And she will know precious little else. She will have no idea of other countries; speak no languages other than Arabic and some little English; know no history; have read no literature; never studied another religion; had no thought other than what she will be told or what she can gather from her limited set of experiences. She will not be educated but trained.

But Jefferson, the American who I most think thought that democracy was natural, said as clearly as he could that there was no democracy without education; that an uneducated people cannot for long be a free people. This may seem like a mere piety or platitude, but it is not. Without the ability to think about alternatives, evaluate courses of action, and weigh consequences, no country can succeed. Most countries can pray for wisdom in their rulers, but where the people rule, wisdom has to reside in them. Again, this is why democracy is hard and why an ignorant people will not long be a free people.

I think we tend to overlook how vital this connection is between education and democratic success. Alexander Hamilton began the very first of the Federal Papers by saying that we Americans were about to prove whether free government was possible or not, whether any people could establish a government from (in his words) “reflection and choice” or whether mankind was forever destined to be ruled by “accident or force.” But “reflection and choice” - serious reflection and wise choosing - don’t come about willy-nilly: they come from knowledge of human nature, of history, of politics; of the real, the illusory and the possible.

Put differently, democracy depends not just on people and their leaders’ ability to decide, but to deliberate.