Tim Furnish, Assistant Professor of World History, Georgia Perimeter College (Dunwoody), in a special piece for HNN:

As a former 101st Airborne Arabic interrogator, I am appalled by the photos of abused Iraqi prisoners. As a conservative, I am disgusted by Republicans who dismiss the mistreatment as just desserts for "thugs." And as an American, I am revolted by liberals who are exploiting this rare lapse in military discipline to go after the U.S. military and the Bush Administration.

There is still more heat than light being produced by the debate over what happened at the Abu Ghraib POW camp. There are no indications anyone was actually tortured, which is defined as "inflicting excruciating or intense pain." That said, what was inflicted upon the Iraqis there violates section 89 of the Army's Law of Land Warfare (drawn from the Geneva Conventions): "Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated [and] protected...against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiousity." And while some at Abu Ghraib may not actually qualify as POWs but "detainees"--by virtue of their having engaged in acts of sabotage or irregular warfare against American forces--they "shall nevertheless be treated with humanity..." (section 248). Being slapped and beaten--or, perhaps worse for Arab Muslims, forced to lie naked on top of fellow detainees--hardly qualifies as humane treatment, even if it is not torture.

So far the breakdown that allowed this to happens seems the result of bad planning in a war zone, rather than--as some on the Left would have it--a policy of intentional oppression of Muslims dreamed up in Crawford, Texas. Normally a U.S. Army POW camp is administered by an active duty military police (MP) unit, which is responsible for housing, administering and feeding the POWs. MPs do NOT interrogate prisoners. That job is supposed to be done only by trained linguists/interrogators, a totally separate military occupational speciality. That the reservist MPs were not sufficiently trained, as alleged, is unforgivable; that they were being ordered to abuse POWs by interrogators who WERE trained, and should have known better, would be revolting.

But MPs and interrogators were not the only players here. The CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and probably the National Security Agency would have wanted a piece of the action, as well, and they seem to have farmed out much of the work to private contractors. Reports indicate it may have been these civilians who instructed young, ill-trained MPs to harass and intimidate prisoners, in an effort to help crush the lingering resistance in Iraq and get wind of any planned terrorist strikes on America.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Army was running Abu Ghraib, and so SOMEONE in the Army chain of command was responsible. Is Brigadier General Janis Kapinski, the former prison commander, just a scapegoat as she alleges, or truly at fault?. We shall see whether this scandal will cost Defense Secretary Rumsfeld his job, but certainly someone else shares blame in-between the privates and sergeants in the pictures and the top brass.

One other question that needs answering is: why were women MPs allowed to interact with Arab Muslim POWs at all--much less lord it over them with dog leashes? That culture is quite patriarchal, and if only for utilitarian intelligence-gathering purposes it's folly to allow such cultural oafishness. Still, contrast the American indignation over this with the calls by Muqtada al-Sadr's deputy for his militiamen to keep captured female British soldiers as slaves. How long will we wait for an imam to condemn that?

The U.S. military should show no mercy to enemy combatants during hostilites. But once its enemies have been defeated and incarcerated, it should treat them magnanimously--and in fact might well heed the Qur'an:

When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads till you have made a great slaughter among them; of the rest make fast the bonds. And afterwards let there be freeing or ransoming, till the war is over. (Sura Muhammad [XLVII]: 4, 5).

David L. Chappell, author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, in the NYT (May 9, 2004):

The 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision this month is a well-deserved feel-good moment for civil rights strategists, but it is only a temporary distraction from the deep conflicts that remain.

Many people earnestly believe that aggressive remedies like affirmative action are still necessary to eliminate the inequality at which Brown made only a glancing blow. Even the most ardent supporters of affirmative action are frustrated, however, because of its persistent unpopularity and its very limited success in closing the academic and economic gaps between black and white Americans.

The Supreme Court's decision last year involving the University of Michigan Law School, though it defended a form of affirmative action, appears to put a 25-year limit on the court's tolerance of even the most scrupulously moderate considerations of race. In the companion decision on Michigan's undergraduate program, the court banned broader forms of affirmative action altogether.

So what now?

Of the shelfload of new books that try to answer that question, "The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action" by Terry H. Anderson (Oxford University Press) is a good place to get your bearings. Following the political scientist John David Skrentny and the historian Hugh Davis Graham, Mr. Anderson emphasizes the "ironies of affirmative action," the policies' logical contradictions and perverse effects. Mr. Anderson, a history professor at Texas A&M, defends many of the policies from simplistic attack. But he makes clear that the best defense of affirmative action has always been that the alternatives to it are even worse.

Mr. Anderson will surprise many with his reminder that the federal government did not commit itself to affirmative action until the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon. Racial hiring preferences had been declared illegal after President Lyndon B. Johnson's brief experiment with them. Nixon revived them, Mr. Anderson says, partly from political calculations. Democratic liberals would be forced to defend and expand Nixon's affirmative action policy. Black hiring preferences would supersede white workers' hard-won seniority rights, thus driving a wedge between union members and black voters. Nixon was able to capitalize on the division by the end of his first term, turning against his own initiatives and other strong remedies, like court-ordered busing. As Nixon hoped, white rank-and-filers abandoned the Democrats in droves.

Opposition to affirmative action persisted, partly because racists resented black success. But people who were not racists also found it hard to justify violating the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause to serve its deeper purpose. And when affirmative action worked at all, it tended to aid those who least needed aid: black students who had already qualified for university admission or come very close. That increasingly meant affluent black students with college-trained parents. Affirmative action offered little to those who suffered most from racism, the poor....

Lawrence Wittner, in ZNet (May 10, 2004):

This May, before Congress adjourns for its Memorial Day recess, the Senate and House of Representatives are scheduled to vote on the annual defense authorization bill. This bill is expected to include several provisions in the Bush administration's budget proposal that make preparations for the building of new nuclear weapons.

New nuclear weapons? Yes; there is no doubt about it. Armed with only 10,000 nuclear weapons, the U.S. government wants some more.

The Bush administration has requested $27.6 million to develop a nuclear "bunker buster," plus another $9 million for "advanced concept initiatives" that seem likely to include work on new, "small-yield" nuclear weapons. The President also proposes an allocation of $30 million toward building a $4 billion "Modern Pit Facility" that would churn out plutonium triggers for the explosion of thermonuclear weapons. And the administration wants another $30 million to dramatically reduce the time it would take to prepare for conducting nuclear test explosions.

Those who have followed the Bush administration's pronouncements regarding nuclear weapons won't be surprised by these proposals. The administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review widened U.S. nuclear options by suggesting possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that don't possess them. The following year, the Nuclear Weapons Council, an administration committee, remarked that it would "be desirable to assess the potential benefits that could be obtained from a return to nuclear testing." In 2003, the Department of Energy's Nuclear Security Administration began a study of building a nuclear "bunker buster," and the head of its nuclear division proposed taking advantage of the White House-prompted repeal of the Congressional ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, of course, the administration has scrapped the U.S. government's long-term commitment to nuclear arms control and disarmamentmade in the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and reiterated as late as the NPT review conference in 2000 -- by withdrawing from the 1972 ABM treaty and refusing to support ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

These shifts in nuclear policy are designed to get the U.S. armed forces ready to wage nuclear war. The Nuclear Posture Review made it clear not only that nuclear weapons would continue to "play a critical role in the defense capabilities of the United States," but that they would be employed with "greater flexibility" against "a wide range of target types." Strategic nuclear weapons were fine for deterrence purposes. But their capacity to annihilate vast numbers of people had horrified the public and, thus, had led government officials to write them off as useful war-fighting implements. Battered by popular protest, even the hawkish Ronald Reagan had agreed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." But this abandonment of nuclear options stuck in the craw of the militarists who garrison the Bush administration, who were (and are) determined to build "usable" nuclear weapons....

David Brooks, in the NYT (May 11, 2004):

It's still too soon to declare the Iraq mission a failure. Some of the best reporting out of Iraq suggests that many Iraqis have stared into the abyss of what their country could become and have decided to work with renewed vigor toward the democracy that both we and they want.

Nonetheless, it's not too early to begin thinking about what was clearly an intellectual failure. There was, above all, a failure to understand the consequences of our power. There was a failure to anticipate the response our power would have on the people we sought to liberate. They resent us for our power and at the same time expect us to be capable of everything. There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well. Far from being blinded by greed, we were blinded by idealism.

Just after World War II, there were Americans who were astute students of the nature and consequences of American power. America's midcentury leaders — politicians like F.D.R. and Harry Truman, as well as public intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and James Burnham — had seen American might liberate death camps. They had also seen Americans commit wartime atrocities that surpass those at Abu Ghraib.

These midcentury leaders were idealists, but they were rugged idealists, because they combined a cold-eyed view of reality with a warm self-confidence in their ability to do history-changing good.

They took a tragically ironic view of their situation. They understood that we can't defeat ruthless enemies without wielding power. But we can't wield power without sometimes being corrupted by it. Therefore, we can't do good without losing our innocence.

History had assigned them a dirty job: taking morally hazardous action. They did not try to escape, but they did not expect sainthood.

That rugged idealism looks appealing today. We went into Iraq with what, in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy. We were going to topple Saddam, establish democracy and hand the country back to grateful Iraqis. We expected to be universally admired when it was all over.

We didn't understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness. As long as we seemed so mighty, others, even those we were aiming to assist, were bound to revolt. They would do so for their own self-respect. In taking out Saddam, we robbed the Iraqis of the honor of liberating themselves. The fact that they had no means to do so is beside the point....

Through all that, down to the present day, and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, this intrepid magazine has been part of the long struggle for peace, for a boundary-less world. It may be useful to recall some of the heroes--some famous, some obscure--of that historic resistance to war.

When the United States government in 1917 decided to send its young men into the slaughterhouse of the First World War, one of the few voices in Washington speaking out against this was a Senator from Wisconsin. This was Robert La Follette, founder of The Progressive, who wrote in the June 1917 issue:

"Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely. It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition. It is just as arrogant, just as despotic, in London, or in Washington, as in Berlin. The American Jingo is twin to the German Junker. . . . If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another."

The Socialist Party, with its hundreds of thousands of supporters, opposed the war, calling it"a crime against the people of the United States." The nation had been at war for a year when the Socialist leader Eugene Debs spoke in Canton, Ohio, outside a prison where three Socialists were serving time for opposing the draft. Debs said:"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. . . . Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. . . . And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."

Those last words were quoted by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in writing the court's unanimous decision that Debs had violated the Espionage Act because his words, with draft-age youngsters in the crowd,"would obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service." Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. Before sentencing him, the judge, acting in the tradition of a judicial system obsequious to the war-making branches of government, denounced those who, like Debs,"would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power."

Here's what The Progressive had to say about Holmes's decision: It is"a doctrine quite unsuitable to a free country."

Helen Keller, a persistent voice against militarism and a contributor to The Progressive, also reacted to the Supreme Court's decision on Eugene Debs. She wrote an open letter to Debs:"I write because my heart cries out, and will not be still. I write because I want you to know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. When I think of the millions who have suffered in all the wicked wars of the past, I am shaken with the anguish of a great impatience. I want to fling myself against all brute powers that destroy life and break the spirit of man."

Despite the huge propaganda campaign of the government and the obedience of the press (The New York Times asked its readers"to communicate to proper authorities any evidence of sedition"), there was widespread resistance. About 900 people were imprisoned for speaking against the war, and 65,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors....

James Melton, history professor and chair of German studies, discussing the roots of anti-Americanism on the Continent, at Emory University's daylong conference called "A New Balance in Europe?" (as presented in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 2, 2004):

What do Europeans think is wrong with us?

Anti-Americanism in Europe today is not a new phenomenon, but at least in my own experience, hostility to the United States among Europeans is deeper and more widespread than I can remember since I first began traveling to Europe on a regular basis some 25 years ago. You just have to visit a European country, read its newspapers, watch its news broadcasts, talk with a reasonably broad range of inhabitants, and you see that. . . .

These attitudes have a history. . . . [They] are an integral part of a discourse, the elements of which arose at different times in the centuries that followed American independence, but they became more or less visible by the period between the first and second world wars. OK, then, what are the elements of this anti-American discourse? Or, to put it less academically, what do Europeans think is wrong with us?

* Americans' belief in their exceptionalism. Since the latter decades of the 19th century, Europeans have often been annoyed by Americans' insistence that the United States is different from and indeed better than other nations, particularly European ones.

The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who worked for a time very unhappily at menial jobs in the American Midwest during the 1880s, wrote, "It is incredible how naively cocksure Americans are in their belief that they can whip any enemy whatsoever. There is no end to their patriotism. It is a patriotism that never flinches. And it is just as loudmouthed as it is vehement."

By this time, American patriotism, which previous commentators like de Toqueville had seen as more or less benign, had come to be seen as more menacing by European observers, all the more so because Americans had not only subjugated their own continent but had emerged as a sea power and had begun to build their own overseas empire. Europe's devastation in the Great War sharpened these fears of an American imperium.

* The second component of this anti-American discourse has to do with what Europeans see as a messianic moralism that is at best naive, at worst hypocritical. I don't think it's any accident that in the 20th century the three American presidents most disliked by Europeans were Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, all of whom were inclined, albeit in different ways, to couch U.S. foreign policy in moral terms.

If you read Sigmund Freud's psycho-biography of Woodrow Wilson, you get a sense of just how pathological Europeans viewed this moralism to be. Former President Carter is revered in Europe today, but it's worth remembering that in the 1970s, he was highly criticized for what Europeans saw as his . . . simplistic moralism. You had Europeans waxing nostalgic for the days of Nixon and Kissinger --- realpolitik, that sort of thing. . . .

* America as an immature and callow adolescent. This image, which European observers began to invoke not long after the founding of the republic, has developed over time to include a number of invidious comparisons between Europe and the United States. Europe has a history; America doesn't. Europeans, like any good adult, acknowledge limits and boundaries; Americans do not. Europeans possess a maturity and patience born of centuries of experience; Americans are an impatient people with too much energy who, like a 2-year-old child, want what they want and they want it now, even if it means ruining the environment or provoking a world crisis.

* Americans and their culture or, precisely, their lack of culture. This is a stereotype that anyone who has spent time in Europe has seen. . . . the image of Americans as shallow, crass, materialistic, deracinated, ruthlessly utilitarian --- no roots, no higher culture, no attachment to anything that doesn't carry a price tag. And if this isn't bad enough, according to this view, our technological know-how, our . . . obsession with efficiency, allows us to export this culture to the rest of the world. . . .

What the war in Iraq has done, whatever one thinks of the decision to invade Iraq, has been to mobilize and galvanize all these disparate elements of anti-American discourse in Europe. So for European critics of American policy, this U.S. decision to "go it alone" epitomizes American exceptionalism --- the belief that we're different, we can do it alone, we don't need the advice or help of the Europeans, thank you.

Second, for these European critics, the arrogance and hypocrisy of American moralism are evident in the administration's justification of the war as an effort to implant democracy in the Arab world. What I hear again and again in talking with Europeans and reading European newspapers is this emphasis constantly on, "This is just a moral fig leaf --- what the Americans are really interested in is oil. This is a war for oil." A very cynical view.

Third, the U.S. decision to undertake military action in Iraq, which is considered a precipitous decision by many if not most Europeans, evokes for them an image of America as an immature, ungainly adolescent who doesn't know what to do with his energy, who turns over the chessboard when things don't go his way. And again, there's this invidious comparison with the Europeans, who are of course cool-headed, mature, have the wisdom of centuries of experience, and so forth.

And finally, the war in Iraq is seen by many Europeans as yet another attempt by the United States to impose its will on the rest of the world. And it has mobilized these European fears of globalization, these fears of Americanization, of a homogenized world of Starbucks and McDonald's.

In Slate (May 4, 2004):

From: Niall Ferguson
To: Robert Kagan
Subject: The "E" Word

Dear Robert,

I know from a debate we had last year that you don't much care for it, but—like it or not—the"e" word now permeates all serious discussion of American foreign policy. In his new book, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, Council on Foreign Relations scholar Walter Russell Mead puts the question starkly:"Is this a world order in which all states have an equal stake, or is it an American empire that the United States imposes on others?" 

In the same vein, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis concedes in Surprise, Security, and the American Experience that one"time-tested solution" to the difficulties inherent in the project to democratize the world is"empire," which he defines—presumably for the benefit of American readers unfamiliar with the concept—as"a situation in which a single state shapes the behaviour of others, whether directly or indirectly, partially or completely, by means that can range from the outright use of force through intimidation, dependency, inducements, and even inspiration."

Well, that strikes me as a pretty accurate characterization of the role the United States plays in the world today. However, like President Bush in his press conference on Iraq last month, both of these eminent analysts of American foreign policy are at pains to point out that the United States is not an empire—or not any more, at any rate. Indeed, their extended essays can be read as fine examples of the condition of"imperial denial," which seems to grow more chronic among America's intellectual and political elites even as the character of American power grows more starkly imperial.

Consider how Gaddis distinguishes American power from traditional imperial power. American history, he insists, has been different, not just because of the country's distinctive geographical location, but also because of a distinctive strategic doctrine inspired by that geography. The lineal antecedent of the Bush administration's current policy is revealed here to be John Quincy Adams,"the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century." (Although Americans are generally wary of the hereditary principle, they do like it to apply in the realm of foreign policy.)

According to Gaddis, Adams' strategy—partly inspired by one of the first nasty"surprises" in American history, the torching of the White House by the British in 1814—had three distinctive components. It allowed for pre-emption, on which basis South Florida and Texas were annexed; unilateralism, hence the Monroe Doctrine instead of an Anglo-American condominium in Latin America; and American hegemony, which came a lot later, but which Adams and his contemporaries fondly imagined. In favoring pre-emption, unilateralism, and American preponderance, Gaddis argues, the Bush administration is merely returning to"an old position."

This is all very interesting, but I am not sure what is so uniquely American about it, nor what distinguishes it from the aspirations of past empires. In a throwaway line, Gaddis tells us that, after the Filipino war of the early 1900s, Americans came to regard"the acquisition of an overseas empire as having been a mistake ... and the experiment was not repeated." Really? Fifteen pages earlier he enunciated the truism that"For the United States, safety comes from enlarging, rather than from contracting, its sphere of responsibilities. ... Expansion, we have assumed, is the path to security." Well, most empires in history have justified their expansion by pleading insecurity.

Mead's approach is rather different. He acknowledges that the United States has long aspired to achieve on a global scale what"ancient Egypt, China and Rome ... accomplished on a regional basis." Fine. But Americans aim even higher. They want"to do more than build another in the world's long succession of great empires." This leads Mead into a discussion of the different forms of power the United States has to offer—"sweet power,""sticky power"—a veritable dessert menu of power. But unless we are to believe that before the United States there was only one sort of power—the"hard" variety—it is not clear how this sets America apart from other empires.

These are two very readable books. I admire the verve of the writing, the range of the erudition. and the rigor of the analysis in both. But in my view neither really makes the case that the United States has in some sense evolved beyond empire into something new and different. They merely assert that it has....

Victor Davis Hanson, in the WSJ (May 3, 2004):

Pictures of American military police humiliating and, in some cases, allegedly torturing Iraqi prisoners in Saddam's old Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad now flash across the world. "The Shame!," Egyptian papers blare out at the sight of a pyramid of contorted naked males amid a smiling female GI. Various human-rights organizations in the Arab World, we are told, are about to condemn formally such barbarism.

Good. These seemingly inhuman acts are indeed serious stuff. They also raise a host of dilemmas for the U.S. -- from the pragmatic to the idealistic. We must insist on a higher standard of human behavior than embraced by either Saddam Hussein or his various fascist and Islamicist successors. As emissaries of human rights, how can we allow a few miscreants to treat detainees indecently -- without earning the wages of hypocrisy from both professed allies and enemies who enjoy our embarrassment? In defense, it won't do for us just to point to our enemies and shrug, "They do it all the time."

The guards' alleged crimes are not only repugnant but stupid as well. At a time when it is critical to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a few renegade corrections officers have endangered the lives of thousands of their fellow soldiers in the field. Marines around Fallujah take enormous risks precisely because they do not employ the tactics of the fedayeen, who fire from minarets and use civilians as human shields.

Yet without minimizing the seriousness of these apparent transgressions, we need to take a breath, get a grip, and put the sordid incident in some perspective beyond its initial 24-hour news cycle.

• First, investigations are not yet completed. Lurid pictures, hearsay and leaked accounts to the New Yorker magazine are not yet proof of torture, either systematic, brutal, or habitual.

• Second, already the self-correcting mechanisms of the U.S. government and the American free press are in full throttle. Responsible parties, from Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt to President Bush himself, have condemned the accused guards and promised swift punishment when and if they are found guilty.

The number of accused is apparently small. Six soldiers are facing court-martial. Their superior, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, along with seven others, have been suspended from their duties. Although all are innocent until convicted by a military court, the media, government, and officer corps by their initial public pronouncements have apparently erred on the side of the soldiers' guilt. But these are defendants whose military tribunals will not be as sensitive to pretrial prejudice as their civilian judicial counterparts.

• Third, we must keep the allegations in some sort of historical context. Even at their worst, these disturbing incidents are not comparable to past atrocities such as the June 1943 killing of prisoners in Sicily, the machine-gunning of civilians at the No Gun Ri railway bridge in Korea, or My Lai. Beatings and rumors of sexual sadism, horrific as they appear, are not on a par with executions that have transpired throughout all dirty wars -- such as the simultaneous reports that Macedonians are now accused of murdering Pakistanis -- but so far have not been attributed to Americans on either the Afghan or the Iraqi battlefield.

American soldiers are not ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Kuwait or executing Kurdish civilians, crimes that in the past went largely unnoticed in the Middle East. So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over.

• Fourth, there is an asymmetry about the coverage of the incident, an imbalance and double standard that have been predictable throughout this entire brutal war.

The Arab world -- where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized -- is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out -- this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East.

Indeed, if Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera could display the same umbrage over mass murder that they do over these recent accounts of shame and humiliation of the detained Iraqis, much of the gratuitous violence of the Middle East would surely diminish. The papers that now allege war crimes are the same state-controlled and censored media that print gleeful accounts of death and desecration of Westerners and promulgate an institutionalized anti-Semitism not seen since the Third Reich....

Since 1961, thanks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we've all been cognizant of the"unwarranted influence" of the military-industrial complex in America. Later in that decade, Senator J. William Fulbright spoke out against the militarization of academia, warning that,"in lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purposes," and called attention to the existence of what he termed the military-industrial-academic complex or what historian Stuart W. Leslie has termed the"golden triangle" of"military agencies, the high technology industry, and research universities."

While we might intuitively accept the existence of a military-academic complex in America, defining and understanding it has never been simple -- both because of its ambiguous nature and its dual character. In actuality, the military-academic complex has two distinct arms. The first is the official, out-and-proud, but oft ignored, melding of the military and academia. Since 1802, when Thomas Jefferson signed legislation establishing the United States Military Academy, America has been formally melding higher education and the art of warfare. The second is the militarized civilian university -- since World War II and the emergence of the national security state, civilian educational institutions have increasingly become engaged in the pursuit of enhanced war-making abilities.

In 1958, the Department of Defense spent an already impressive $91 million in support of"academic research." By 1964, the sum had reached $258 million and by 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam War, $266 million. By 2003, however, any of these numbers, or even their $615 million total, was dwarfed by the Pentagon's prime contract awards to just two schools, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University which, together, raked in a combined total of $842,437,294.

War-Making U or U Make War?

West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy. The mere mention brings to mind a vision of dashing, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, straight-laced cadets in sharp uniforms (or perhaps the shadowy specter of rampant sexual harassment and rape), but if, when it comes to military education, you're only considering the big-3 service academies with the Merchant Marine Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, and private schools like The Citadel thrown in for good measure, think again!

As it turns out, the military and the Department of Defense (DoD) have an entire system of education and training institutions and organizations of their own, including the many schools of the National Defense University system (NDU): the National War College, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the School for National Security Executive Education, the Joint Forces Staff College, and the Information Resources Management College as well as the Defense Acquisition University, the Joint Military Intelligence College -- open only to"U.S. citizens in the armed forces and in federal civilian service who hold top secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearances" -- the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, Air University, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Marine Corps University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, among others. In fact, scholar Chalmers Johnson has noted in his new book on American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire, that there are approximately 150 military-educational institutions in the U.S.

While the service academies train a youthful corps of tomorrow's military officers, enrolled in the schools of the National Defense University are a group of selected commissioned officers, with approximately 20 years of service, and civilian officials from various agencies, including the Department of Defense, who are schooled in a curriculum that emphasizes"the development and implementation of national security strategy and military strategy, mobilization, acquisition, management of resources, information and information technology for national security, and planning for joint and combined operations." Further, good old' NDU sustains the golden-triangle military agencies, the high technology industry, and research universities by"promot[ing] understanding and teamwork among the Armed Forces and between those agencies of the Government and industry that contribute to national security." To this end, the school also opens spots to"industry fellows" from the private sector who, says NDU president and Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn,"bring ideas from industry to the Defense Department."

Joe College Gets Drafted

In 2002, NDU's budget topped out at $102.5 million -- about what MIT alone received from the DoD… in 1969. While the formal military-academic complex of service academies and DoD institutions is a massive educational apparatus, its size, scope and cost pale in comparison to those in the increasingly militarized civilian higher educational structure.

During World War II, as historian Roger Geiger has noted, educational institutions carrying out weapons development not surprisingly received the largest government research and development contracts. Six of them, in particular, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, received the then-massive sums of more than $10 million each. Following the war, military entities like the Office of Naval Research (ONR) sought to establish, strengthen, and cultivate relationships with university researchers. By the time the ONR officially received legislative authorization to begin its work in August 1946, it had already entered into contracts for 602 academic projects employing over 4000 scientists and graduate students. Academia has never looked back.

For example, at the close of World War II, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the nation's largest academic defense contractor. By 1962, physicist Alvin Weinberg sarcastically remarked that it was becoming difficult to figure out if MIT was a university connected to a multitude of government research laboratories or"a cluster of government research laboratories with a very good educational institution attached to it." By 1968, a year after Fulbright coined the phrase"military-industrial-academic complex," MIT already ranked 54th among all U.S. defense contractors. In 1969, its prime military contracts topped $100 million for the first time. By 2003, that number had grown to $514,230,083, good enough to make the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the 48th largest defense contractor in the United States.

But MIT is far from alone. Today, the scale of interpenetration of military projects and academia is as dizzying as it is sweeping. According to a 2002 report by the Association of American Universities (AAU), almost 350 colleges and universities conduct Pentagon-funded research; universities receive more than 60% of defense basic research funding; and the DoD is the third largest federal funder of university research (after the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation).

The AAU further notes that the Department of Defense accounts for 60% of federal funding for university-based electrical engineering research, 55% for the computer sciences, 41% for metallurgy/materials engineering, and 33% for oceanography. With the DoD's budget for research and development skyrocketing, so to speak, to $66 billion for 2004 -- an increase of $7.6 billion over 2003 -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Pentagon can often dictate the sorts of research that get undertaken and the sorts that don't.

The power of the Pentagon extends beyond an ability to frame or dictate research goals to significant parts of our civilian education establishment. Higher education's dependence on federal dollars empowers the DoD to bend universities ever more easily to its will. For example, as Chalmers Johnson notes, until August 2002, Harvard Law School"managed to bar recruiters for the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the military because qualified students who wish to serve are rejected if they are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual." However, thanks to a quick reinterpretation of federal law, the Pentagon found itself able to threaten Harvard with a loss of all its federal university funding, some $300 billion, if its law school denied access to military recruiters. Unable to fathom life ripped from the federal teat, Harvard caved, ushering in a new era of dwindling academic autonomy and growing military control of the university.

But the Department of Defense isn't only about the stick. As noted above, it spends most of its time directing research by bestowing plenty of carrots, in the form of money and, sometimes indirectly," credentials" (that lead to money). Take the National Security Agency (NSA), the DoD-allied intelligence organization that runs the National Cryptologic School which"serves as a training resource for the entire Department of Defense." In addition to listening in on the globe and running its own school, the NSA doles out a seal of approval, in the form of a CAE designation ("Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education") that puts other schools in the running for lucrative DoD"Information Assurance Scholarship Program grant awards." For 2003-2004, some 36 civilian schools and 4 military learning centers earned CAE honors. These include long-time DoD stalwarts like Stanford University, big state schools like the University of California at Davis and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and lesser-known institutions like New Mexico Tech, West Virginia's James Madison University and Vermont's Norwich University (the self-professed"oldest private military college in the United States").

The NSA, however, has to share the spotlight with a host of other military, militarized, or intelligence agencies and subagencies when it comes to the military-academic action The credo of the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland, for instance, is"delivering science and technology solutions to the warfighter" which it strives to do by"put[ting] the best and brightest to work solving the [Army's] problems" by employing"a variety of funding mechanisms to support and exploit programs at universities and industry." The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) is also high on"University relationships" that provide it with"an excellent recruitment resource for high-caliber graduate and undergraduate students." Its SPAWAR Systems Center in Charleston, S.C, alone, has cooperative agreements with Clemson University, the University of South Carolina, The Citadel, the College of Charleston, Old Dominion University, North Carolina State University, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, the University of Central Florida and North Carolina A & T State University.

March (and April and May and June and…) Madness

With the NCAA's"March Madness" just behind us, perhaps it's a perfect moment to reflect on college national champions. As always, the basketball crown was decided by a simple elimination tournament that gave us a clear winner (unlike the 2003 NCAA Division I Football season which ended in a split decision). In keeping with the spirit of crowning college champs, Tom Dispatch offers its own national championship series, the DoD Bowl!

The college hoops tourney is always replete with a Cinderella squad -- a small-time five that shocks the field of sixty-five by knocking out a few top teams. In a Tom Dispatch tournament these might be schools from the DoD's"Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Institutions Infrastructure Support Program." Such institutions don't get the big dollars of a national powerhouse, but they get modest awards to"enhance programs and capabilities at these minority institutions in scientific disciplines critical to national security and the DoD." Under this program, researchers at Oglala Lakota College, Si Tanka University (chartered by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), Sitting Bull College and the College of Menominee Nation, among others, were designated for grants ranging from $76,000 to $400,000.

Of course, grants of this size are small potatoes when it comes to the DoD."Big time" schools get a whole lot more. As such, the DoD Bowl seems like a perfect place to settle a matter that failed to be resolved on the gridiron last season. Just who is the national champion -- LSU or USC? Late last year three Louisiana State University units -- its Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices, the Advanced Materials Research Institute at the University of New Orleans, and the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at the LSU Health Sciences Center -- received the first installments of a $7.5 million, five-year project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But even with a big chunk of DARPA-bucks, LSU can't touch USC! If the football national championship could be decided by DoD cash, the University of Southern California would win it hands down. Not only is USC the site of the Institute for Creative Technologies, a $45 million joint Army/USC venture begun in 1999 and designed to link the military ever more tightly to academia and the entertainment and video game industries, but last year USC received nearly $35 million in DoD Contract Awards for Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E). And even with that, USC ranked only 74th on the DoD's Top 100 list of RDT&E awardees, while poor LSU didn't even make the list.

While almost $35 million in research dollars isn't chump change, it doesn't come close to winning you the DoD bowl. And while USC beats its rival the University of California system, which rakes in only $29.8 million in RDT&E awards, it can't top Carnegie Mellon's $59.8 million and the University of Texas system's $86.6 million. None of these schools can touch Penn State which, at number 27 on the list, handily trumps them all with a total of $149 million in RDT&E awards. Still, even Penn State has a long way to go to win it all.

Two schools are consistently tops in RDT&E money and have, in the past, duked it out for numero uno. In 2002, Johns Hopkins University ($363,342,491) bested MIT ($354,932,746) by less than $900,000, the equivalent of an inch in your basic fourth-quarter goal-line stand in football! In 2003, though, it wasn't even a contest. Last year MIT raked in a whopping $512,112,618 in RDT&E dollars to Johns Hopkins' positively puny $300,303,097, making it the clear-cut national champion! No polls needed!

MIT's numbers were good enough to rank it as 11th on the DoD's 2003 RDT&E Top 100 list. But even that ranking doesn't convey the full dominance of this champion. At 23 on the RDT&E Top 100 list is the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit originally made up of several hundred MIT employees and formed in 1958 to create new technologies for the Department of Defense. Today, MITRE provides engineering and technical services to the federal government through three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) -- one of which, the DOD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence FFRDC, happens to serve the Department of Defense. Moreover, MITRE, itself, is thoroughly wrapped up in the military-academic complex. It provides support to a"broad base of customers within the DOD and intelligence community," while"organizing and managing the first-of-its-kind Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) for the Advanced Research and Development Activity," which includes among others Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the State University of New York-Buffalo, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester and Syracuse University. Talk about webs within cogs within wheels!

With all this work for the DoD, MITRE rakes in a cool $186,389,105 in RDT&E awards. And if the funding dollars of MIT's offspring are added to MIT's total, the resulting $698,501,723 would move MIT out of the college bowl game entirely and into the charmed circle of top 10 defense contractors, including the likes of defense industry giants General Dynamics and Lockheed-Martin.

Academia's Unnoticed Identity Crisis

Even without MITRE's money added in, MIT's Pentagon-financed research dollars make it look more like a military-industrial giant than an educational institution -- a far more severe identity crisis than the one Alvin Weinberg hinted at back in 1962. But, while MIT might be the champ, it's only a small part of the story -- about 1/350th of it. Today, the Pentagon not only runs a massive educational apparatus of its own, but with its enormous budget and arm-twisting ability, it can increasingly bend civilian higher education to its will. There is, however, little awareness of this influence, let alone outcry over it. Instead, the militarization of academia reaches new levels -- unnoticed and unabated.

The military-academic complex is merely one of many readily perceptible, but largely ignored, examples of the increasing militarization of American society. While the Pentagon has long sought to exploit and exert influence over civilian cultural institutions, from academia to the entertainment industry, today's massive budgets make its power increasingly irresistible. The Pentagon now has both the money and the muscle to alter the landscape of higher education, to manipulate research agendas, to change the course of curricula and to force schools to play by its rules.

Moreover, the military research underway on college campuses across America has very real and dangerous implications for the future. It will enable or enhance imperial adventures in decades to come; it will lead to new lethal technologies to be wielded against peoples across the globe; it will feed a superpower arms race of one, only increasing the already vast military asymmetry between the United States and everyone else; it will make ever-more heavily armed, technologically-equipped, and"up-armored" U.S. war-fighters ever less attractive adversaries and American and allied civilians much more appealing soft targets for America's enemies. None of this, however, enters the realm of debate. Instead, the Pentagon rolls along, doling out money to colleges large and small, expanding and strengthening the military-academic complex, and remaking civilian institutions to suit military desires as if this were but the natural way of the world.

NOTE: If you're keen on enrolling in the military-academic complex, check out these links that are sure to send you to the head of the class: The National Defense University; Air University; and the Marine Corps University. Or, for those with"top secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances," why not apply for a spot in next year's freshman class at the Joint Military Intelligence College. Already have your PhD in war-making from NDU and a certificate in [information deleted] from JMIC? Then why not check out the job opportunity page at MITRE? They're currently looking for an intelligence analyst with"Intelligence Community and Joint experience" for the recently much-maligned FBI (unless another faithful TomDispatch reader has already accepted the post).