John Agresto on Iraq, Part II

[Note: Yesterday I posted the first half of John Agresto's commencement speech to the graduating class at Samford University. Agresto was at that time still serving as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq. He's also featured in a front-page story in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. A graduate of Boston College, he holds the Ph.D. degree in Government from Cornell University. His distinguished career includes government educational service and the presidency of St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The second half of his address begins below. Winfield Myers]

Now, when I look at Iraq, I’m quite uncertain of its future. Compared to what we have here in America, education there is not liberal and liberating but narrow and confining. A few months ago I went with two assistants and visited a university president in the North of Iraq. Over dinner one of my assistants got into an argument with the president. My other assistant told me I should stop it - that they were fighting. But it was clear to me they weren’t fighting but arguing: laying out their positions, marshaling evidence, debating the consequences. They were doing something I had not seen in my then six months in Iraq - they were having a rational argument. Before this I had seen many Iraqis fight but never make an argument - a real argument. To them, deliberation simply meant stating a position and declaring your belief in it. If more people applauded you than applauded the other guy, you won the argument. But it never had anything really to do with argument or reason or persuasion truly, but simply assertion.

When I asked the university president why this was the first rational political discussion I had heard in six months in Iraq, he gave me these reasons -
• First, their religion: the truth was written, and if written was not to be questioned.
• Second, their fathers: if their fathers said it, and if his father said it, then it was true. To question what your father has said is tantamount to saying he hasn’t told you the truth: so no questioning there either.
• And third, their education - the professors and the textbook are there to tell you the truth - you are not to question it, you are to memorize it and repeat it. And if you memorize and repeat it exactly as it was said, you will get a good grade. To question your professor is to say he may have been wrong, or not explained it well. This way of teaching and learning, the university president said, had so “infected” the Iraqi mind that he wondered if Iraqis could ever be free, since they were incapable of thinking for themselves. They would always wait to be told what to do, wait to be told the truth.

But this, he said, would change. If I would help him, he and a few other university presidents would begin universities, or reform their current universities, so that thinking, questioning and deliberation could take place. We can’t change the nature of their religion; we can’t change the character of their families - but we can change their educational experience. We can let students think about their course of study, choose their majors freely, see more than just their specialties and give them breadth and not just narrow, expert depth. Give them, in summary, the ability to reflect and choose. Give them the tools for rational deliberation. Then, maybe, democracy might grow. But only then.

And I learned - looking back on America - how fortunate we are to have not just education, not just training, but truly the experience of liberal and liberating education. And I am for the first time seeing how our success as a democratic people has depended to some large measure, on our particular kind of colleges and universities. How here, to use this time a phrase from James Madison, we see liberty and learning leaning on each other.

Well, I learned one more thing in Iraq about democracy. Again, this falls under the heading of how difficult and not easy democracy is. Let’s go back to my young friend who started being charitable in order to be more “American.” What he really was trying to be, as I think I indicated, was “neighborly.” He was trying to do something alien to him - have a personal relation with people not of his family or tribe.

In America we express this neighborliness in a thousand small ways: we have our clubs - Rotary, Elks, Knights of Columbus. We have library guilds. We have Alumni Associations and friends of Samford University. We have non-profit organizations, charitable foundations; we have, in sum, a thousand organizations to teach us to consider our neighbor. To think of his needs. To think about working together for common goals. To think about something more than ourselves. I don’t think we realize how closely we Americans are tied to each other until we see people who have no common ties beyond their family or tribe. I don’t think we realize how much we Americans actually like one another and are willing to sacrifice for each other. But there is no democracy without that.

I know we talk a good game on the other side. We talk about rugged individualism, and privacy, and being left alone. But, when we need to, we really are willing to sacrifice our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor for one another. I don’t know that the Iraqis are.

I’m struck by the fact that we, indeed, liberated them. And I have to tell you the vast majority of Iraqis are very happy that we deposed Saddam. This alone to them, and to me as well, was worth the war. But we liberated them, we did not join them in their liberation of their own country. Unlike Afghanistan, there was no Northern Alliance we helped support; unlike Eastern Europe there was no Solidarity to give aid to. No, we did it for them. They did not fight for their own liberation. More importantly - they did not fight for the liberation of their neighbors. And I do not know how you build democracy where there is not only no democratic history but no civic association, no Rotary Clubs helping out others, and no neighborliness.

We are now over there desperately trying to build “civil society” in an Iraq where there is none. Maybe we will succeed. And, if we do, then democracy has a future in Iraq. But if we fail, then I’m back to considering how hard it is to make a democracy where there is no democratic constitution, no sense of shared purpose, and no civic friendship.

There’s so much more to talk about - how Saddam turned a whole nation into people afraid to take any initiative whatever. How no matter how free we tell them they now are, they still seek permission before they try anything. How, more than tyranny, socialism taught them that they should expect to be fed and housed, and that work was irrelevant to success. How a culture of dependency and a culture of entitlement can and does break the human spirit.

So let me end where I began. I have now spent just under a year seeing what tyranny does to people, what kind of people Iraqis are and, above all, what kind of people Americans are and how generous we are; how naive we are, especially when it comes to things we hold dear, like education and democracy. And, above all, how blest we are. We inherited what we didn’t work for; and what little we achieve is only because others gave us the tools.

I think you graduates should go forth in gratitude, in humility, in pride in your country, and, as we heard last night, in actively contributing to hope in this world.

Thank you.