WEST POINTERS VISIT BAGHDAD UNIVERSITY

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WEST POINTERS VISIT BAGHDAD UNIVERSITY

James Joyner | Monday, January 19, 2004

This Army Times/AP report highlights some of the cultural obstacles we’re facing in rebuilding Iraq:

To the Army, flying eight West Point professors to lecture at Baghdad University was a chance to showcase the militaryâs scholarly and humanitarian credentials.

For the Iraqi students and professors in attendance, the lectures smacked of education at the wrong end of an M-16.

“We don’t want them inside our university or inside our country,” said Fuad Hamdan, 24, a political science student, watching as U.S. troops frisked those entering the lecture hall.

This week’s series of guest lectures from the U.S. Military Academy turned out to be another example of what the Army considers its good works being misunderstood by those living under its occupation.

Although the lecturers were unarmed, their American security escorts carried M-16s into the classroom. Students and professors complained to a reporter afterward about the presence of armed occupation troops on the grounds of a center of learning.

“I can’t stand it when they put their guns in my face,” said a woman professor who asked that her name not be used. “This is a university, not a battlefield.”

The woman professor sat through a lecture Wednesday on recent trends in political science from Col. Robert Gordon, who directs West Point’s American Politics department. The Iraqi professor said she found Gordon’s material divorced from Iraq’s reality.

More relevant, she said, would have been an academic discussion on Americans’ views of Arabs, a popular topic on this campus of 40,000 that sprawls across a thumb of land bordered by the Tigris River.

About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.

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