An Education in Occupation

Hugh Gusterson, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, argues that the destruction of the Iraqi university system played a part in de-modernizing the country.

In just 20 years, then, the Iraqi university system went from being among the best in the Middle East to one of the worst. This extraordinary act of institutional destruction was largely accomplished by American leaders who told us that the US invasion of Iraq would bring modernity, development, and women's rights. Instead, as political scientist Mark Duffield has observed, it has partly de-modernized that country. In the words of John Tirman, America's failure to acknowledge the suffering that occupation wreaked in Iraq "is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder." Iraq represents a blind spot in our national conversation, one that impedes the cultural growth that stems from a painful recognition of error; and it hobbles the rational evaluation of foreign intervention. Is it too late to look in the mirror?