Under the Iraqi Perspectives Project, one of the five topic areas under the Minerva Research Initiative, the Pentagon will allow access to its collections of seized Iraqi records for the lucky ones who are interested in exploring “the political, social, and cultural workings and changes within Iraq during the years Saddam Hussein was in power”. The collection of seized records “offers a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary scholarship combined with research in methods and technologies for assisting scholarship in automated analysis, organization, retrieval, translation, and collaboration”.

This latest Pentagon initiative is not only a continuation of its previous negative attitudes, but it also constitutes an escalation in its violation of international conventions on the safeguarding of cultural heritage of occupied territories, and goes against the principles of rule of law, self-determination, and human rights that are supposed to govern the so-called Free World.

This essay approaches the issue of the use and abuse of the seized Iraqi records from legal, academic, moral, and social-political perspectives. It will be argued that the seized Iraqi records are of academic and practical significance for the Iraqis in dealing with the issue of the Saddam regime’s destructive legacy and in implementing the project of constructing a democratic Iraq, founded on the rule of law and freedom of information.

Opening Remarks

Records are fundamental for the construction of any nation’s collective historical memory. This is why the protection of documentary heritage has been enshrined in international legislation, notably the 1954 Hague Convention.

For modern societies, the accumulation, preservation, and provision of access to records are of great importance for social stability and political progress. The issue of safeguarding records is vital, particularly for the development of newly-emerged democracies, such as Iraq. Transitional regimes can sustain their political legitimacy, consolidate national unity, and create general consensus by facilitating unimpeded access to all types of information in a responsible way.

Rational and well-considered access to the records of the Saddam regime’s repressive organizations is vital for the future of the Iraqi people, as they currently suffer from severe ethnic, religious and regional divisions. From a political, legal and human rights points of view, the declassification of these records will not only help with the identification of the perpetrators of crimes and the rehabilitation of the victims, but also with the implementation of a true national reconciliation.

Those who closely follow news about Iraq will be aware that the ‘New Iraq’ needs urgently to put an immediate end to the current abuses of the seized records for political and financial gains. Without recovering the missing and the seized records, this noble goal can not be attained.

US civilian and military officials in Washington and in Baghdad are fully aware of the fact that the archives of the Saddam Regime’s repressive organizations and other civilian institutions were extensively looted during and immediately after the 2003 invasion. The Americans were themselves involved in the lootings. We all know that tens of millions of the seized Iraq records were shipped to the U.S., while the remnants are kept inside Iraq under tight American control. The seized materials include government records, non-governmental records, the Ba’ath party records and personal papers of high-ranking officials of the former regime.

During the CPA[2]‘s reign and the subsequent period of Iraq’s sovereignty, U.S. military and U.S. State Department officials encouraged and even helped others to loot and then to ship abroad Iraqi records, notably the Iraqi Memory Foundation (IMF). The latter is essentially a private American initiative, whose activities unequivocally violate current Iraqi archival legislations (No. 111 of 1969 and No. 70 of 1983). The IMF does not recognize Iraq’s national government or its sovereignty. And this is ironic, given the fact that the ‘New Iraq’ is considered to be a close ally of America!

Legal Argument

The U.S. has been the hungriest scavenger of other nation’s records in the world; a position that reflects the numerous conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved, since the Second World War. U.S. seizures include records from: Germany, Russia, Poland, North Korea, North Vietnam, Grenada and Afghanistan.

While itself seizing tens of millions of current records of the former Iraqi state, during and immediately after the 2003 invasion, U.S. military and intelligence agencies tolerated the looting of what remained of Iraqi records by local political parties, organizations, citizens and even foreign reporters. In some cases, the U.S. government purchased records from a few well-known Iraqi looters of records, notably the president of the Political Prisoners Association, who fled the country after a warrant was issued for his arrest by the Iraqi authorities. He now lives in America!

The American seizures of current Iraqi records were not of an indiscriminate nature, in contrast to some other examples in Germany, Korea and Vietnam. If one divides the looted and destroyed Iraqi records into different categories – e.g. political, military-security, administrative, and cultural – one will find that the Americans were not interested in cultural records whatsoever. (By cultural records I mean the ones that are stored in national archives or libraries). The Americans were however extremely interested in seizing current records of a political and security-military nature. And they paid special attention to the files of the Ministry of Oil. The archive of the ruling Ba’ath party, which the Americans considered to be of lesser value, was handed over to Kanan Makiya’s IMF.

Moreover, the Americans allowed and tolerated the lootings and even the destruction of non-current historical records and rare books in Iraq. The lootings and the destruction of the Iraq National Library and Archive and other cultural institutions are notable examples. Foreign and local eyewitnesses are in agreement that American soldiers and their field commanders took an indifferent stance when most of the destruction and the lootings were taking place in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Interestingly, the Americans have adopted discriminate attitudes towards the non-current historical records of Iraq. Whilst allowing the destruction and the lootings of these records, they showed considerable concern about the Iraqi Jewish records. The latter were rescued as soon as the War ended and were shipped immediately to America where they have been receiving restoration treatment from LARA experts!

There is no doubt in my mind that the Americans violated the international law of war in tolerating the destruction and the looting of non-current records and other records they considered to be of no importance to them. However their indifferent attitudes to the lootings and the destructions went against the U.S.’s own interests in many respects. First, they damaged enormously the U.S.’s international reputation and credibility. Second, they created a very negative impression among Iraqi citizens and particularly the educated classes. The latter viewed the Americans as mere ruthless imperialists, soon after the invasion. Third, the Americans needed information contained in the looted and destroyed records for the purposes of the day-to-day administration and reconstruction of Iraq.

American military and intelligence authorities have continued to make more serious mistakes. By introducing the Minerva Research Initiative, the Pentagon is practically and overtly usurping our duty of collecting, preserving and facilitating access to Iraqi records for all people, who may and should use them for research and other legitimate purposes.

Providing access to sanctioned US universities, US research centers and US scholars is gross discrimination against the undeniable owners of the seized records, the Iraqi People, who are the main subject of the records. By taking this ill-conceived action, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence agencies have disregarded important considerations, including the right to privacy, the appreciation of cultural distinctions, respect for the social sensitivities of another nation, and respect for the rights of the victims.

The international conventions provide for the use of seized records for the purpose of administering the occupied territory. But, they certainly do not provide for the shipment of the seized records to the occupiers’ Capital or for making all or parts of these records accessible for propaganda and politically-motivated research purposes.

What the Iraqis want is that the U.S. Government should follow previous precedent, when for example it returned the records of other countries, such as Korea, German, Vietnam and Grenada. After signing the 1954 Hague Convention recently, the U.S. now has clear obligations to protect and to return all current and non-current records of the occupied Iraq, including the archive of the Ba’ath party seized by the IMF.

Academic Argument

The decision of the Pentagon to make the seized Iraqi records accessible for research purposes comes after the failure of the so-called Iraqi Survey Group to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction or concrete links between the Saddam regime and Bin-Laden among the seized Iraqi records. The question is why now the Pentagon is allowing the seized Iraqi records to be used for seemingly academic purposes. Is this shift of emphasis from political to academic genuine? Is the ultimate aim of the Pentagon to know nothing but the truth?

If the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are sincere, why do not they allow us, the true owners of the records, too to use the seized records for ‘academic’ purposes? Why do not they deliberate with the Iraqis about their ‘academic’ project? Why do they keep the original Iraq records in their storage rooms, after they digitalized them?

We will argue that the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies will likely not let scholars study all the records they seized, especially those which contradict the views and policies of the U.S. administration or the alleged national interests of the U.S. What surely will be available for scholars to study are those records which, at least, do not harm the reputation or the interests of the influential political, military and intelligence establishments.

In terms of expertise, specialism, commitment and impartiality, there is a huge difference between a foreign organization whose function is primarily of a military and intelligence nature and an independent national archive that collects, preserved and facilitates access to records of a nation for academic uses and for other legitimate, non-military and non-intelligence purposes. We do not know what code of ethics or criteria the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies might have been using in treating, processing or selecting the seized records. We do not know to what extent the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies might have changed, manipulated or destroyed data or records to distort evidence or to hide undesirable facts.

There is also the issue of the gaps in the records seized by the Americans. We are all (including U.S. military and intelligence agencies) aware that tens of millions of important records are still missing or under the control of several Iraqi and non-Iraqi groups. How can one draw a complete and objective picture while there are considerable gaps in the records seized by the Americans?

We all, Iraqis and Americans, should be really concerned about the prospect that the U.S. and other powers may use the manner in which Iraqi records were seized, shipped and declassified as an example to be followed in future conflicts.

We hope that our American colleagues will not follow the example of the Hoover Institute in avoiding its academic responsibility. A true academic institute will not give shelter to the illegitimately-seized and illegally-shipped records of the Ba’ath party.

American universities, research centers and independent scholars should reflect on what has happened in Iraq, since the 2003 Invasion, before applying to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative. We believe that they should be interested in supporting our efforts to make all the records of the former regime accessible to all of us in a responsible manner, without violating the sovereignty of Iraq and the dignity of its people.

The Moral Argument

The issue of seized records of other nations has a clear ethical dimension for both sides: the occupier and the occupied. There is hope that U.S. universities, research centers and independent scholars will acknowledge the moral dimension of the issue of seized Iraqi records, and react to it accordingly in a positive and a constructive manner. From an Iraqi point of view, moral values are especially relevant to those who are thinking of using such records in their researches.

There is a shortage of studies on the ethical issues surrounding the use of records of conquered nations by the institutions and the people of the conquering nations. But one can distinguish two general types of ethics in this respect: first, pragmatic and second, academic. U.S. political, military and intelligence institutions resort to pragmatic morality to justify their monopolized use of seized records of other nations. For the Iraqis, this is an undeniable cultural imperialism, which is not really different from the colonists’ looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts of colonized peoples during the last two centuries.

Moreover, there is no real difference between the actions of the arsonists loyal to Saddam Hussein, who destroyed millions of records, including those of Iraq National Archive, and the actions of the U.S. army and intelligence agencies that seized, shipped and abused tens of millions of other Iraqi records. The actions of the arsonists and those in the U.S. army and intelligence agencies are identical insofar as they impinge considerably upon the true interests of Iraq’s citizens.

The monopolized use of the records of the conquered nations by the conquerors for questionable research purposes should not be interpreted as mere misconduct. By their very nature, such researches will involve premeditated abuses. They will definitely benefit the political and military establishments of the conquerors, and will be detriment to the newly-established political regime and especially to the people of the conquered territories.

The main concern of the Iraqis is not that their seized records have been used to assist the Americans with conducting their military campaigns against al-Qaeda and the Ba’athists or with the implementation of their policies in the occupied Iraq. Such actions are allowed or at least tolerated by the international laws of war. The real concern is that the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have hid or even destroyed certain undesirable Iraqi records. Are not these awful actions morally wrong? The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been abusing the information contained in the seized records for tightly controlling the life and the destiny of Iraqi people. So far, evidence shows that the records have been used to blackmail or recruit many of those who were part of, or cooperated with, the former regime. By keeping anonymous the identity of all those who are the opponents of the new regime, the Americans have been intentionally obstructing the course of justice and undermining the construction process of a new Iraq. The Iraqis do not know the names of many politically dangerous and often corrupt elements that have occupied, or continue to occupy, sensitive positions in the state and in the government.

If one deeply examines the post-WWII experiences, one will discover that there is an urgent need to replace the prevailing pragmatic morality with a new academic one; one that gives priority to the interests of the conquered nations, and respects unconditionally the principles of national self-determination and the rule of law at international level.

It is a matter of urgency that, in the foreseeable future, international experts on archives and related archival problems will be able to set definite rules for the use of and accessibility to seized records of conquered nations.

Social and Political Argument

During his 35 years in power, Saddam built several oppressive organizations and enlarged the military for the purpose of waging wars of aggression and suppressing internal opposition. These agencies and the Ba’ath party made hundreds of millions of records that well-documented the daily lives, the deaths, the reactions, and the activities of millions of Iraqis.

In the post-Saddam era, these records have continued, and will continue, to have far-reaching effects on Iraqis’ lives and destinies, due to the fact that the Saddam regime bequeathed a massive legacy, especially in the fields of inter-communal relations, politics and culture. For this very reason, the Iraqis, not the Americans or any other foreign people, should first deal with or come to terms with their bitter past through responsible and legitimate use of the records. Iraqi people have every right to discover the truth by themselves about the forces and the events that left terrible effects on them for many years, especially those who suffered enormously during Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. This is common sense.

In the post-Saddam era, the Iraqis have been encountering many and enormous challenges from every direction. True scholars, who are experts on Iraqi’s modern history and politics, recognize that overcoming internal divisions, defeating terrorism, and containing blind religious fanaticism will require a deep understanding and an objective representation of the recent past.

The Iraqi side has made its position as clear as possible. The access to, and the use of, the Iraqi records must be governed by special Iraqi legislation that will be enacted by an elected Iraqi legislative body. The legislation must objectively take into consideration the priorities and the reality of the situation in the post-Saddam Iraq, which are as follow:

• granting the victims a genuine opportunity to rehabilitate and restore their human dignity and to be compensated accordingly and adequately;
• offering all Iraqis who were party to the events or cases mentioned in the records a true chance to rehabilitate themselves under rule of law;
• contributing to the ongoing efforts to unearth the fate or the whereabouts of missing and deceased persons;
• facilitating the efforts to bring to justice all those who committed crimes against Iraqi people, particularly those who were involved in the genocide against the Kurdish people;
• facilitating the process of a genuine national reconciliation among the Iraqis in order to overcome deep internal divisions, to create social stability and to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence;
• establishing an as objective and as comprehensive picture as possible of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, in the hope that it will assist with the formation of a genuine national memory;
• making the Iraqi people aware of the truth regarding all the gross violations of human rights and horrific crimes committed against certain communities so that they can prevent their reoccurrence in the future;
• rebuilding a modern administration structure;
• attaining genuine national sovereignty; and
• consolidating national security.

Concluding Notes

The Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA) has been demanding the repatriation of all the seized Iraqi records. Its staff is aware that no archival legislation can be enacted without first studying the content of these records. The INLA has been working on several fronts, notably the amendment of current archival legislation so that they can deal extensively with the highly sensitive records of the former regime, the adoption of legal methods to recover all the looted records, and inhibition of the misuse of these records by Iraqis and non-Iraqis, inside and outside the country. The proposed legislation will differentiate sensitive records from non-sensitive ones in terms of access and use. The INLA has already obtained a large portion of the archival collections of the Ministry of Interior of the former regime.

The INLA favors the idea of setting up a special entity for the records of the former regime within its existing structure. It is the only institution that has credibility among the public and scholars alike. Moreover, it can guarantee neutrality and objectivity as well as adherence to an enlightened code of ethics, when dealing with highly sensitive records.

Unlike during the pre-2003 period, the INLA is no longer the ideological tool of a repressive regime. It has transformed beyond recognition so that it can function as the archive of all Iraq and for all Iraqis, regardless of their ethnic and religious backgrounds or political orientations. The INLA is a secular, liberal, and democratic institution. The policy of decision-making, and the way in which the targets and strategies are being set, are democratized. There is no longer any restriction on accessing records or acquiring new publications. The INLA has been busy declassifying hundreds of historical records, access to which the former regime prohibited.

Public records are the inalienable property of people, especially those who are their subjects. Constructing Iraq’s documentary heritage and ensuring the legitimate use of sensitive records, are the duties of all genuine archivists, true scholars, and honest human right activists, regardless of their nationality, race and religion. The Iraqis hope that the Americans will follow their own example in 2003, when they returned thousands of sensitive records of the agents of the former East German secret service to the German authorities. These records have been used for legitimate purposes ever since their return to Germany

[1] http://www.arl.army.mil/www/DownloadedInternetPages/CurrentPages/DoingBusinesswithARL/research/08-R-0007.pdf

[2] Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), established as a transitional government following the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the other members of the coalition.

Social scientists who choose to engage with the military through their research sometimes experience an epistemological or cognitive slippage between the way we frame issues and the ways in which the military frames them. The reason for this is quite straightforward: like all epistemic communities, the military thinks about the issues of interest to it in ways that are subtly different from those of other epistemic communities, in this case academic social science.

If social scientists are to engage effectively with the military, they must first find out more about their uniformed interlocutors, sponsors and funders. In the frontier zone where military and academics encounter each other there is a need for translators: people who “speak the language” and are familiar with the culture and worldview of the other. We have not been good at this. We need to send some of our community over to them as amateur “anthropological scouts.” This is something we can all do: I am not suggesting a research program for anthropologists.

We tend to think of the military as a rather homogeneous and largely total institution. A significant number of serving military officers were born into military families, grew up on military bases, and have served all their adult lives in a notoriously enclosed set of institutions. (And, of course, there are professors who are children of professors and who have never worked outside of the academy.) The military are different from us in many ways, and part of this is that they often think about things differently. These differences arise from different formative experiences, from social location and organizational interest, and from the military’s own sense of what its role in society and its principal professional tasks are. Exactly what these epistemological differences are is a matter for another, lengthier paper. Suffice it to say that if social scientists are to effectively engage with the military, we will need some understanding of these cultural differences.

Any large organization like the military is bound to be quite diverse. We are likely only to engage with a very small section of the military. We are unlikely to have much to do with submarine drivers or helicopter pilots: we will primarily engage with military intellectuals. These people are engaged in their own intra-mural debates which we will often find esoteric. Military intellectuals have a different vocabulary, make different assumptions, have different methodologies and criteria for evaluation, different rhetorical strategies. We need to understand these. If we don’t, we will be blind to the ways in which our research is filtered and appropriated by the military.

There is a surprisingly large number of military intellectuals: officers whose primary task is intellectual activity of some kind. They work in the professional military education complex, in the training and doctrine commands, in headquarters units, preparing plans and policies, and in the interface between the military and the political system in Washington. They write for military journals like Joint Force Quarterly, Military Review, Parameters, the Marine Corps Gazette, the Naval Institute Proceedings, the Naval War College Review, Air and Space Power Journal, and many others. If you want to see what they argue about, check these out. Most of them are on the web.

The military educational complex is large: there are the three well-known service academies that provide a college education for aspiring officers: West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. There are the Command and Staff Colleges run by the services and by the Joint Staff to train mid-level officers. Then there are the War Colleges where senior officers spend a year, sometimes two – six of them: the Army, Navy, Marine and Air War Colleges, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the National War College. Each of these educational institutions is staffed by military intellectuals. Add up the numbers: there are a lot of them. Moreover, most of these educational establishments are host to one or more military think-tanks or research groups. The Army War College, for example, hosts the Strategic Studies Institute, the Command and Staff College has the Combined Arms Center, and West Point has the Combating Terrorism Center.

In addition, there are also less familiar institutions: the doctrine commands (in each service and in the Joint Staff) where military intellectuals attempt to distil the lessons of recent operations. Here there are teams of people focused on thinking about such things as social networks, command and control systems, the causes of political conflict, the future shape of the human world, etc. Then there is the Pentagon, a hot-house of staff officers seeking to influence the Washington political system. In short, there are many hundreds of military officers scattered about bases throughout the country doing what we would think of as social science research.

It is these people, the military intellectuals, with whom we will be in contact. They already know quite a bit about us: many of them have graduate degrees in history and the social sciences. In fact, they know more about us than we do about them. They have spent time amongst us, and we have (generally speaking) not spent much time among them. Analogically speaking, they are the anthropologists, and we are the tribe. The flow of knowledge is going largely in one direction. We cannot have a meaningful conversation if we only hold it on our territory; we need to send members of our tribe into their territory to learn more about them and engage them in locales where they set the frames for discussion.

Often, the contacts will be mediated by the organizational men and women of the military, the managerial types. They will inevitably think of social science research products in a technicist manner: as specific problem-solving tools that they can apply to problems as they, the military, have defined them. Many social scientists, however, will want to try to get the military to redefine problems, and to think anew about how best to utilize social science expertise. This will require long-term active engagement. This is where the “anthropological scouts” and “cultural translators” come in.

My concrete proposal is to establish a number of social science fellowships to place academics in military think-tanks and research institutes for one-year stints. Ignore, for the moment, the issue of funding sources: that can be discussed separately. The idea is to take genuinely civilian social scientists (i.e. not people who are already working with the military in a sustained way) and place them in a military research environment. From the point of view of the social scientist, this is a bit like a sabbatical: he or she would have to do some work, but it would be a change, hopefully a refreshing change. From the point of view of the military think-tank, this would be a net addition to their research staff. Everybody benefits in the short run.

The long run benefits are what interest me. On the one hand, this will give some of us an opportunity to immerse ourselves in a very different and interesting organizational environment. We can act as amateur anthropologists, learning how our military counterparts think about things, and the ways in which those thoughtways are different from our own. After our one-year tour in the military, we can then explain things to our colleagues back in academia. The long-term benefit will be the creation of a corps of social scientists who, after their immersion experience, have a good understanding of how their counterparts in the military approach issues of war and peace. It should enable us to engage with them more effectively. From the military point of view, it enhances the capacity of social science to usefully address questions that matter to them. With persistence we may persuade some of our military colleagues to reframe issues in ways that make more sense to us. Speaking perhaps immodestly, I think this would be a service to the world as a whole. It is better to have a smart military than to have a dumb military.

There are many details to be ironed out, and many ways in which such a program could be expanded. There will also be considerable resistance from within the military, particularly from those who scoff at the ability of ivory-tower academics to address themselves to real-world problems. It is precisely this sort of resistance that we need to overcome if we are to have a real dialog. Top leaders in the Department of Defense have asked for our help. We won’t know whether we can make the military into the kind of military we want unless we try. Now is the time to make the effort.

Of the five major program interests articulated by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the program guidelines, three of them focus on areas that are either irrelevant to national security or framed in ways that are likely to render the research results irrelevant or redundant. One program, on China, is broad based but still raises niggling doubts. The fifth, an essentially open category, has its problems, too. Let’s look at each of them.

Three of the five are on terrorism, and this is the main source of trouble. The first of these is on “the strategic impact of religious and cultural changes within the Islamic world.” This assumes that religion is a proximate cause of terrorism. The first sentence of the official topic description provides the link: “Current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight the need for a better understanding of the influence of and trends in Islamic and cultural norms … ” A few sentences later, a question is posed: “How can the West better understand the militant madrassah school and radical missionary movements and their messages … ?” Another, separate initiative regards “terrorist organizations and ideologies,” including research on “non-rational decision making” and “belief formation and emotional contagion.”

These two in particular are treading on thin ice. A considerable amount of research has been conducted, much of it via interviews with failed suicide bombers and others accused of violent acts.[1] Most of this does not demonstrate a strong link between religious devotion and a propensity to commit political violence, nor greater likelihood of violence by those attending koranic schools, among other, similar results. The loaded matter of emotional contagion and non-rationality is problematic on many counts, not least in assuming Western decision making is free of such influence; in addition, it assumes weakly that such roots of behavior can be modeled and predictive with respect to political violence. Money from the Defense Department, moreover, will close off many of the most promising avenues of field research because of the apparent taint.

More important is the larger question of whether or not the handful of terrorists worldwide truly constitutes the kind of security threat that warrants this scale of research effort. While there are many quite interesting research questions in the field of terrorism studies, the supposition in Minerva is that these are so important to U.S. security that they consume 60 percent or more of these new, large research funds. (A third program, “Iraqi Perspectives,” is meant to delve into captured Iraqi documents, a significant objective of which is to describe Saddam’s links to terrorism.) At first blush, this looks like another triumph of what John Mueller piquantly calls the “terrorism industry.”[2]

Two other categories are on tap. One is completely open, it seems, and is therefore unreadable as a set of priorities. It is admirable that DoD has this, but will be even more interesting to see what is eventually funded. The fifth is on Chinese military and technology development. New Chinese documents will be made available to scholars, with the hope that broad trends in Chinese military thinking and strategy will be discerned as a result. It may constitute a new Kremlinology, which had been stirred by the Pentagon in the 1950s, and if it is the harbinger of a new kind of area studies, we should at least take note of the history of such an enterprise.[3] But in its current form, Minerva’s topic on China is an obvious and relatively benign notion — know thy enemy. For example, the request for proposal suggests some lines of inquiry, including “understanding [People’s Liberation Army] perceptions of China’s international role and military needs.” China scholars no doubt welcome more raw material to be made available to them, though the English-language versions apparently are often useless (because of poor translation) and very few scholars would want to do the translations for the archive. If one purpose is to create a larger community of scholars on China and security, now rather thinly populated, more direct ways would be preferable.

China aside, then, the new challenges to American security and interests appear to rest entirely with Muslim malcontents. This is not a plausible concept of actual security threats. I won’t argue some of the obvious points (for example, that the U.S. is creating more terrorists in Iraq than any other font), but merely point out that the transitory menace of political violence is now, as it has always been, a tiny fraction of the magnitude of other threats to our well being. We have a record of what Muslim terrorist organizations can do and have tried to do in the seven years since their one-off spectacle on 9/11. Even the 2006 London airline bombing plot, described as the most serious since 9/11, showed yet again how far away from actual operability such little gangs almost always are. While more damaging actions take place occasionally — Madrid, the London Tube — they are pallid by comparison to our own misdeeds in Iraq (which is what stimulates nearly all these attacks in Europe and elsewhere) or, more to the point, to the kinds of things we should worry about.

And what are these worrisome things? They vary from the quite specific (Iran’s nuclear program) to the very general (climate change). As an in-between objective, let’s consider “democratization,” or, in its threatening form, the lack thereof in authoritarian states on one end of the spectrum and failed states on the other. Considerable amounts of research have delved into authoritarian structures, as there also is with the more recent interest in failed states. But the potential impact of democracy building to transform either has largely gone begging as a research topic, even as it has become a cardinal element of U.S. foreign policy and is likely to persist as such for some years to come.[4]

Consider other possible priorities. A putative threat like Iran’s nuclear development could stir a useful set of inquiries about diplomatic innovations to contain would-be nuclear weapons states. The immigration imbroglio of 2007 might have convinced Minerva managers to propose how vast migrations from the global south affect everything from physical security to social security, presenting challenges to national identities, integration, and (in the sending countries) sustainability. The chronic violence in “post-conflict” societies might spark curiosity about why that is and what could prevent it. HIV/AIDS and other epidemical diseases can spur a political contagion of instability, as sudden and high mortality afflicts societies unable to cope or recover, yet relatively little is known about the actual social dissolution caused by disease or the potential and broader threats should the disease conditions worsen. Virtually the identical shortcomings in knowledge about climate change are apparent — the actual effects socially, politically, and economically at certain stages of warming are now a matter of nearly pure speculation.

Another recent development that goes nearly unnoticed in research funding: the rise of oil and gas prices worldwide has earned newspaper coverage of the pain and suffering of American consumers, but the impact of the precipitous price hikes on developing countries is not well known. Add to that the related crisis in food prices and distribution, and one has the recipe for wholesale disasters that have largely escaped the notice of U.S. elites. While recent in its current form, such crises have been brewing for many years. Food security, education, and health (as well as and economic stability generally) were buffeted by the World Bank’s and IMF’s structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the 1980s and 1990s; bilateral conditions on aid often insisted on privatization as well. Privatization of land and other agricultural assets disrupted traditional farming and animal husbandry, while other policies undermined local farming. Health systems were also undercut by SAPs, either by insisting that state assets and budgets be reduced, or by pushing privatization (occurring simultaneously with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, undercutting local and national efforts at prevention). These policies not only failed to a significant degree, but likely contributed to conflict, as economic reform and political reform often were pushed on third world countries without sufficient attention to their destabilizing effects. Yet the academic literature on this debacle is sorely malnourished, for a variety of reasons, and we simply do not know enough to draw correlations, build knowledge, and inform policy.

So we have right before our eyes the simmering (if not exploding) mixture of instabilities that do indeed create threats to the United States and its allies, in addition to whatever tragedies beset the billions of people directly afflicted. Why are some of these matters not front and center on the Minerva docket? The simple answer is because they aren’t perceived as imminent threats to Americans — they are remote and they are in some sense eternal (contemporary versions of the Four Horsemen). They are, some of them, quite complex — all the more reason to marshal large-scale research consortia and Minerva’s admirable emphasis on interdisciplinary work and field-based studies. But another answer is that they involve past or present U.S. policies that in some major ways are responsible for the problems themselves, or the lack of an adequate response to them. The combination of this remoteness, complexity, and culpability places all of them in the dustbin of Pentagon concern.

Yet each and every one mentioned above is, in my judgment, far more serious than terrorism. It is essentially an American solipsism that is driving this definition of threats. In this, then, Minerva is a missed opportunity on a massive scale — investing heavily in the irrelevant or minor, ignoring the monumental and urgent.

[1] See, for example, Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2006); Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (Hurst, 2008), among many others.

[2] John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, 2006).

[3] On this see Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in Andre Schiffrin, ed., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New Press, 1997); and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Area and Regional Studies in the United States,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 789-791.

[4] I was dumbstruck a few years back when a government official came to SSRC to ask us to undertake an evaluation of democratization programs, which, she said, had never been evaluated systematically. The subsequent discussion among some scholars made it clear that such assessments, even understanding what democratization is, required serious attention among scholars as well.