[Marxism] Academia serving imperialist war

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, December 22, 2007
Scholars and the Military Share a Foxhole, Uneasily
By PATRICIA COHEN

The United States military is frequently criticized for not doing enough 
to reduce civilian casualties or to stabilize the places it is fighting 
to protect. Yet what happens when the outside experts who can offer such 
advice are condemned for doing exactly that?

Questions about collaboration between soldiers and scholars have been 
around at least since World War II, but they have arisen with particular 
urgency in recent months at professional meetings, in journals, on 
campuses and on the Internet over programs related to Afghanistan and Iraq.

At Harvard, some faculty and activists have been troubled that the 
university’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the 
counterinsurgency field manual, even though the center’s aim was to 
reduce civilian casualties. Members of the American Psychological 
Association have had fervid exchanges over what role — if any — its 
members should have in military interrogations. And anthropologists have 
passionately argued over a Pentagon program that uses these social 
scientists in war zones.

These sorts of controversies have appeared “in various permutations at 
different times,” said David Wippman, a professor at Cornell Law School 
who worked on humanitarian affairs for the Clinton administration, 
mentioning similar debates over participation in humanitarian 
assistance, the Iraqi war crimes tribunal and the proceedings at 
Guantánamo’s detention camp.

In the Harvard dust-up, the worry is that the essential secretiveness of 
the military will transform the long-cherished openness and transparency 
of the university, bringing the campus green a bit too close to the 
parade ground.

“How could Harvard sit there and put the imprimatur of a human rights 
center on counterinsurgency?” said Tom Hayden, the Vietnam War-era 
activist, who has complained about the collaboration in The Nation and 
on The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “It lends an Ivy League 
cloak of legitimacy to counterinsurgency, which is inherently secret.”

For Mr. Hayden; Richard Parker, who now teaches at the Kennedy School at 
Harvard; and Harvey G. Cox Jr., a faculty member of the Harvard Divinity 
School for more than 40 years, the Vietnam War is a touchstone in these 
debates.

“I’m of a generation that is skeptical about this,” Mr. Parker said. 
“Universities aren’t innocents,” he added, noting that he was speaking 
from a campus building “named after a convicted felon.” (His office is 
in the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government, named 
for the former chairman of Sotheby’s who was convicted of price fixing 
in 2002.)

“In the era of Abu Ghraib,” he said, such cooperation “does damage to 
the university’s credibility and autonomy.”

It is not as if the military “is unaware of these issues,” he added; 
“there’s nothing that they couldn’t get on the Internet” if they were 
interested in improving their practices.

Participants may think they are immune to being compromised, Mr. Cox 
said, but human nature being what it is, “I’m not confident that a lot 
of people who think they can humanize the system can prevent themselves 
from getting carried away.”

Sarah Sewall, the faculty director of the Carr Center and a former 
Pentagon official, said: “I hear grumblings from faculty at Harvard. For 
people who don’t understand, it can be a little mystifying.”

But once she has had the opportunity to explain how the center is trying 
to instill institutional change within the military, she said, skeptics 
have come around. “I have yet to find anyone with whom I’ve spoken for 
any period of time who doesn’t understand why,” she said.

The decision to explore where humanitarian and military interests might 
intersect dates back to 2000 — before 9/11, before the invasion of 
Afghanistan and before the Iraq war, Ms. Sewall said.

The work on the counterinsurgency field manual — considered the 
military’s “war-fighting doctrine” — grew out of a conference sponsored 
with the Army War College in 2005, in which the center tried to show 
that protecting civilians was critical to the success of 
counterinsurgency programs, she said.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, was 
impressed with what he heard, she said, and on the spot began assembling 
a team to revise the doctrine. That group met with additional 
human-rights groups the following year.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with cooperating with the military, 
said David Rieff, who has frequently written on the moral complexities 
of human-rights assistance. “The counterinsurgency manual is really a 
manual about maintaining hegemony in the world,” he said, and if one 
thinks that American might can be harnessed for doing good, then it 
makes sense to collaborate.

“I don’t believe that,” he said, but he knows others do. As it turns 
out, the Pentagon program that employs anthropologists is part of the 
new counterinsurgency doctrine, although the idea of using social 
scientists to interpret the culture of an enemy has a long pedigree. In 
perhaps the most famous example, Ruth Benedict’s wartime study of the 
Japanese, eventually published as “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” 
played a critical role in how President Roosevelt shaped the terms of 
surrender with the Japanese.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists explain tribal customs and work 
to improve health, security and education, efforts that have helped 
significantly reduce combat, Army commanders say. Some of the 
anthropologists’ colleagues nevertheless insist that such programs 
compromise the entire discipline, put all practitioners working abroad 
under suspicion and prolong the war. At the American Anthropological 
Association’s annual meeting three weeks ago, a special commission 
issued a report that analyzed this ethical minefield, though it did “not 
recommend nonengagement.”

Among psychologists, the arguments are even more pointed. The American 
Psychological Association has passed wide-ranging bans on participating 
in any form of torture, but some psychologists argue that the 
association should go further and forbid psychologists from even being 
at Guantánamo or in locations where secret C.I.A. interrogations take 
place. Situations in which prisoners are denied due process, are kept in 
isolation or jailed for an indefinite period are by nature inhumane, and 
psychologists who are there are inevitably complicit, opponents of the 
cooperation maintain.

But Navy Capt. Morgan T. Sammons, a psychologist who has worked with 
detainees, argued at the psychology association’s annual meeting in 
August that military psychologists had consistently opposed mistreatment 
and promoted safeguards.

“We cannot absent ourselves,” he said. “It would be irresponsible for us 
to do that. Only by becoming as involved as we have can we ensure that 
abusive practices do not occur.”

Bonnie Docherty, a human-rights researcher who also teaches at Harvard 
Law School, does not see what all the fuss is about. “We don’t want to 
be co-opted by the military,” she said, “but I think there can be an 
important dialogue between the two groups.”

Ms. Docherty recently completed a report on the National Training Center 
at Fort Irwin near Barstow, Calif., that was published by the Carr 
Center. She complimented commanders at Fort Irwin, saying they were 
“receptive to our recommendations” about protecting civilians and had 
followed some earlier advice.

“We offer recommendations to other governments and other bodies,” she 
said, “so I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to offer them to the 
military as well.”