Virtually all of the serious reporters in Iraq — and there are several — have noticed that both our political and military leaders there have no clear picture of the enemy. Some think we’re fighting a Baathist underground, with a handful of foreign terrorists tossed in for leavening. Some of our guys even give numbers, saying the foreigners are somewhere between five and ten percent. Others, above all those on the Syrian and Iranian borders, speak of a massive flow of killers into Iraq. This confusion derives from several causes. First and foremost is the disarray of the intelligence community, produced over more than a quarter-century of politicization, mounting restrictions from Congress, a surfeit of lawyers, and America’s own cultural shortcomings (we don’t study history, geography, or foreign languages). These critical weaknesses cannot be cured in a couple of years. It will take at least a generation to fix, even with the best leadership.
Before you tackle a problem, you must first identify it, then isolate it. Can this be done? Doubtful, at least in the short to medium term, because of issues like this http://hnn.us/articles/1765.html
Washington’s Evergreen College, for example, features two courses on 20th century U.S. political history: "Dissent, Injustice, and the Making of America," and "Inherently Unequal." The latter course, which addresses U.S. history since 1950, holds as an indisputable premise that in the 1990s, "racist opposition to African American progress and the resurgence of conservatism in all branches of government barricaded the road to desegregation." California State University-Monterey Bay, another AAC&U-oriented school, likewise presents students with only two, clearly biased, courses examining the history of American government institutions. Those wanting more U.S. political history are invited to take such classes as "History According to the Movies," "California at the Crossroads," and "Multicultural History in the New Media Classroom." The historical profession needs balance, not intolerance. No one denies that students should have the opportunity to sample such offerings from the new social history as "History According to the Movies." But courses in American political, diplomatic, and legal history are at least as important. Groups such as The Historical Society, which has brought together historians of all viewpoints to champion a return to a discipline based on reasoned appeals to evidence rather than promotion of an ideological agenda, have resisted the exclusion of whole fields from college history departments. In addition, the Miller Center for Public Affairs, housed at the University of Virginia, has launched an ambitious project to promote and fund innovative new scholarship in the history of American political development. Still, historians seem unlikely to create an intellectually diverse profession on their own. As recently noted by University of Pennsylvania professor Erin O’Connor, publisher of the weblog Critical Mass, since "scholarship—centered on questions of identity, oppression, and power relations—is in turn a sign of a particular political commitment," faculty diversity will "only be pursued insofar as it ensures and perpetuates ideological uniformity." |