Bennett’s title sums up the thesis of his textbook clearly: America is literally, simply, the last and best hope for the human species. Tough luck, China — or Burma, or Ecuador, or any other nation on the planet — because we R it, the alpha and omega. It’s a classic reactionary thesis: “I can’t imagine any nation ever being as great as America; therefore no nation ever will be.” Argument by lack of imagination — a favorite among opponents of evolution, biological or historical.

My students used to leave this book on their desks between classes, so I had a chance to flip through it. I expected it to be awful, but it was even worse than I could have guessed. Bennett gives sleazy imperial apologists a bad name. If you want to see this thing done well, try Hitchens or Paul Johnston, the British neo-imperialist historian from the Thatcher era. Bennett, who can’t write worth a damn and has never done original research in his life, is the worst of that very bad lot.

One student, the son of prominent Kurdish freedom-fighters and a genuine believer in things like intellectual freedom, saw through Bennett and had the courage to complain about the book. The teacher replied, “Well, this is a conservative university and it’s my job to give you the conservative perspective.” A simpler, more honest answer would have been: “Look, kid, I got this job by sucking up to John Agresto, who happens to be a close friend of William Bennett, so my hugely-inflated salary depends on feeding you this crap.” I still remember the disgusted shrug the student gave after telling me the story. He was learning about Western standards of intellectual integrity, all right — but not the way he was supposed to be.

Luckily for the students in American History, they spent most of their time watching war movies rather than reading Bennett’s Sunday School tales. Since I taught in the same cabin as our American History instructor, separated from his class by a flimsy metal wall, I got to listen to a whole semester’s worth of bad WW II films. Three long months of trying to teach my students to use the simple present, rather than the present progressive, in their essays, shouting to be heard over the corny dialogue coming through the wall: “I’m hit, Sarge! Uh…go on without me!” usually followed by explosions that rocked the thin metal wall, as Sarge and friends took their revenge for the Gipper.

His one criterion was “bad language.” He wouldn’t show any movie with swearing in it (thus eliminating every decent war movie ever made). That scruple served him in place of any squeamishness about giving his teaching to the likes of William Bennett and John Wayne.

And for this, he was paid about $15,000 per month. The only reason I know he made that much is that he was a terrible braggart. We’d just been paid our first month’s salary, in cash, and as he walked with me among the cabins, he crowed, “Here I am walkin’ along with $15,000 cash in my pocket!”

He didn’t rate that sort of money because of his qualifications. As in, he didn’t got none. Not even a Ph.D. (though he claimed later to have picked one up from an online degree mill). He had no recent teaching experience, and no academic publications. Even by the lax standards of AUIS, the disparity between his rank and his qualifications became the object of speculation.

It was only through his habit of boasting that we found out the truth. As the winter break approached, he started strutting around telling everyone how he was going home to lobby Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, his home state, to send AUIS a big grant. He liked to boast while grooming himself in the stinking men’s room of the Cabins, which always stank like a chicken coop in hot weather. Standing at the urinal, he boasted to anyone trying to empty their bladders in his vicinity that his wife was one of the richest women in the state and a close friend of the Senator. He’d have no trouble getting an audience with Chambliss.

So that $15,000/mo. salary was only nominally for teaching; the man was actually a lobbyist with connections to the sleaziest and most lucrative crannies of the Southern rightwing elite. When I heard him boasting about his connections to Chambliss, I looked up the good senator and got another involuntary lesson in the utter falseness of the ideals holding up AUIS and its constituency. Saxby Chambliss was elected to the Senate in 2002 thanks to campaign ads showing the incumbent, Max Cleland, next to photos of Osama bin Laden. Even John McCain called the ads “reprehensible.” But that’s not the worst of it: Max Cleland, whose patriotism Chambliss impugned, lost three limbs to a grenade while fighting in Viet Nam. Saxby Chambliss never served, supposedly because he had a bad knee from playing high school football. The knee, of course, miraculously recovered once ol’ Saxby was past draft age [6].

But there was no time to get angry at the history professor, because by the time the news that he was an unqualified lobbyist came out, we were already trying to deal with a psychotic sexual episode, another classic of rightwing pathology.

This boil-over was especially shameful, because it involved an American male professor abusing and intimidating a woman, a violation of our sacred mission to teach the Kurds to value free, independent women.

The American who boiled over was a strange little fellow– a hollow-eyed fanatic, one of those tenth-generation Calvinists who can’t help meddling in everyone else’s business. And what he hated most, naturally, was … free, independent women.

The woman he decided to obsess about was a foot taller than he was. He didn’t like that. And he didn’t like the fact that she was teaching in Iraq while her husband was back home in the US. Worse still, this woman was in the habit of having lunch with a man — a tall preppie who was not her husband. This proved unendurable to our mad midget. He started his campaign by glaring at her for weeks — you know that classic rightwing expression, a mixture of frustrated lust and cowardly rage? And then he decided God wanted him to take action. First he went to have a little pastoral intervention with the tall, dim Preppie guy this woman lunched with. He told the Preppie that, by having a falafel with a married woman, he was threatening the sanctity of marriage and leading the woman into sin.

The preppie had little to say in return. He himself was a classic subspecies of North American Phalangist eugenics: tall, athletic, but not exactly the sharpest oar on the rowing team. I once had to listen to him at a party, drunkenly boasting that he was going to open up a McDonald’s in Sulaimaniya, going on and on about how his father had raised $16 million recently and would have no trouble coming up with the $900,000 he’d need to start a Mickey D’s in Kurdistan.

After screaming at the male preppie, the little Calvinist hunted down the American woman, the real culprit, and harangued her about her sins. She didn’t take it very well, even dared to object to being sermonized. That was when the little fellow lost it completely. He ended up screaming at her, “You’re nothing but a whore, you fucking whore!”

The woman complained to Agresto, who called the little man into his office for a mild scolding. It was interesting that Agresto considered this explosion such a minor infraction. In a real American university the mad midget would have been fired, or placed on psychiatric leave, but after all, he had acted in the defense of traditional values, so his outburst was classed as a misdemeanor, a matter of excessive zeal. He’s still teaching at AUIS, very popular with the administration, loathed by students.

I soon learned that the rules were different at AUIS. My first slap in the face came in Jordan, hours after we newcomers had flown in to begin the academic year. At an outdoor buffet at the hotel there, AUIS’s Personnel Director, Lara Dizeyee, told us, “If you’re Jewish– keep it to yourself.” I waited for the sky to fall; you don’t talk that way. I thought it was illegal to say things like that. But no one said a thing. The people who ran AUIS anticipated and enjoyed this cowardice; they clearly enjoyed frightening the faculty.  Every time something happened, Joshua Mitchell, our “acting chancellor,” would announce a meeting, and we’d file in — middle-aged men and women with fancy academic titles, all hunched over and shuffling like eighth-graders. Mitchell would take a seat front and center, never looking at us; then, after a gravitas-gathering pause, address us in a petulant whine.

After a few of these meetings, we realized that Mitchell’s speeches always had the same thesis: something had gone wrong again and, as always, it was the faculty’s fault.

The first crisis was the most dramatic: one of the ESL teachers was raped by two local men who’d offered her a ride. We only learned about this through the grapevine;  no word came from the main building for several days, at which time Mitchell called a meeting to discuss “the incident” — he would only refer to it that way. The meeting was our introduction to the Mitchell crisis mode: a long, pompous oration designed to buffer the unwelcome news. When he finished, we knew no more about “the incident” than we had before — but we knew that whatever horrible thing had happened, it was our fault.

That vague blame wasn’t good enough for the Dean of Student Affairs, Denise Natali. She stood up and began shrieking at us that “the incident” was all our fault — specifically the fault of the American women on the faculty. In this case, it was…sleeveless blouses! That was what had caused the rape! Natali, always excitable, couldn’t seem to stop repeating her accusation: “I see women walking around here in sleeveless t-shirts! Tank tops! What do you expect?”

Everyone looked around furtively, checking out their neighbors’ attire. But there were no tank tops, sleeveless t-shirts, or other beachwear in evidence. In fact, our female students dressed much more provocatively than women faculty. The rule in Suli seemed to be that as long as the skin is covered, anything goes, including skintight black leotards.

Natali, not finding any wardrobe crimes, just repeated her accusation more loudly: we had brought it on ourselves!

I felt the same mental confusion as when the HR director told us to keep any Jewishness to ourselves. Had Natali actually said that it was the rape victim’s own fault, and that any other woman who dressed immodestly deserved to get the same treatment? I remember hesitating to believe what I was hearing. I grew up in Berkeley, where you assume the world would end if anyone said such things out loud. But she was saying them, repeating them in the same crazy shriek, and everybody was taking her very seriously, or pretending to.

We didn’t get a saner version of “The Incident” until our Kurdish security director came for a follow-up talk a few weeks later. He showed up in what he took to be the American manner: informal, relaxed, the complete opposite of Mitchell and Natali. And when asked to explain the rape, he said simply, “Look, Kurdish young men do not handle their drink very well. I would say, if you want to be safe, just don’t go where young Kurdish men are drinking.”

As usual, the Kurds had contradicted our neocon leaders’ view of them; and once again, the Kurds seemed to make much better Americans than the actual specimens we brought over to run the place.

The Big Death Threat

This became painfully clear when our shriek-prone Dean of Student Affairs Denise Natali got the death threat.

The trouble began with a typically heavy-handed, authoritarian policy directive from the Main Building: teachers were to take attendance every single day. If a student missed two classes, we were to inform Denise; any student missing four classes was out of the course. Period. No excuses accepted, not even major surgery.

By the time we got this order, we were used to the AUIS way of doing things. The new policy was a perfect fit for AUIS; it concentrated power in the hands of the bigwigs in the Main Building, kept the faculty off-balance, and scared the students.

By mid-semester, Natali had expelled several students for missing class. Our courses cost a lot of money by local standards, so anyone but the arrogant fools who ruled AUIS would have expected trouble. But like their masters in the Iraq occupation, the bosses at AUIS never imagined that they might be liable to normal human reactions. And when the reaction came, they proved as feeble and weepy when taking abuse as they were callous and boastful when dishing it out.

Someone didn’t like getting scolded and expelled;  so, one weekend, someone taped a death threat to Natali’s office door.

As usual, it took several days for the Chancellor, Mitchell, to respond. And as you’d expect, the response, when it finally came, involved another grand meeting, a ponderous oration, and a bizarre memo.

That memo became notorious. It was so offensive and downright ridiculous that it proved too much, even for the cowed, venal faculty. Its thesis, of course, was that the death threat was all our fault. We teachers had forced Natali to play bad cop, and now she was paying for our cowardice. This was a lie, of course; the whole point of the harsh attendance policy was to reinforce the Main Building’s power over what went on in the cabins. But Mitchell had clearly written in heat; he and Natali were very close, and since it could not be the administration’s fault, he decided it must be the faculty’s, as you’ll see in this excerpt:

“The letter Denise received [containing the death threat] suggests that its author was a student who is disgruntled by a decision that Denise implemented.  I say “implemented” rather than “made” because every teacher and administrator on the academic side of the house is bound by AUI-S policies-and expected to act within their proper purview to enforce those policies.  It is no secret that too often during the course of the last year faculty members and administrators have played the “good cop,” which has forced Denise into a position of making the tough call that should have occurred elsewhere.

This cannot ever happen again.  I need your promise that it will not…

Under no circumstances may you any longer pass a tough decision off to Denise, or to her successor, should Denise leave shortly.

I don’t know how I can make this any clearer, except to say that it is a condition of your ongoing employment that you do abide by this understanding…”

That was the real point: the concluding paragraph warning that dissent will lead to dismissal. It was classic neocon rhetoric, starting off with high-minded blather about togetherness (“in concert”) and ending up with a reminder that they could fire any of us, any time they felt like it. We knew that; Agresto and Mitchell had already fired most of the Business Department in the most vindictive possible manner. One of them had complained bitterly to me that when he wrote to Agresto asking whether he’d be wanted back or should pursue other opportunities, Agresto sent him a one-sentence email: “I’d look into those other opportunities.” Another Business prof was fired, rumor had it, because she was involved in a lawsuit against the Federal laboratory where Agresto’s wife worked. What could you do, sue them? In Iraq? They had all the power.

So we let Mitchell browbeat us in this ridiculous memo; there was nothing we could do.

It was the students who really responded to Mitchell effectively. And they did it by saying nothing at all. According to everything that Agresto and Mitchell told us, those students, indoctrinated in civic duty by the likes of Bill Bennett (who began his career in public service by informing on his Harvard roommates for smoking pot), our students should have fallen over themselves to turn in the anti-freedom thug who posted that threat.

Mitchell, naturally, sent the students a memo to encourage them to inform — an unintentionally comic mixture of bluster and threats with patronizing instruction in the norms of “civility”:

This past Thursday, April 22, a faculty member received a written Death Threat [sic] taped to her AUI-S office door…

Any student who has knowledge about this Threat is expected to come to my office before 4 PM on Monday afternoon.  If you do not come forward,and I later discover that you had any knowledge of this, you will be immediately and permanently expelled from AUI-S.  If you do come to my office with the name or names of the person or persons responsible, you will be pardoned and allowed to stay at AUI-S…

Until further notice, every single student and guest coming on campus will be padded down, and whatever bags you carry will be fully inspected.

This is an American University.  We grant you liberties that you do not have at other universities here in Iraq.  In return, we expect much.  Most notably, we expect decency and civility in all that you do.  One or more of your classmates has now violated those terms.  As a consequence, all of you will be affected for the rest of the school year and beyond.  Do not forget that with liberty comes responsibility.

Earnestly,

Joshua Mitchell
Acting Chancellor
http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7809&IBLOCK_ID=35 [7].  This link is attributed to you.  Absent your correction, we presume it is you. The obscenity and racism included in this link, and others not unlike it, are vile. They are, moreover, anathema to everything this university represents.  If this piece, and especially the image it contains, were ever made public in Iraq, your life, our lives, and the life of the university would be in danger.

As a courtesy to you and Katherine we will box up and ship your goods to an address in the US or Canada that you provide us.
John Agresto
Provost

I had to read the letter a few times to believe it. The article he linked to was published four years before I’d been hired. It had been sitting in plain view online since 2005. It was all listed on the CV I’d sent with my application. I’d even given a talk to the AUIS journalism students about working for the eXile, where this article had been published. If Agresto or any of the big shots had come to the talk, they would have seen me hand out examples of the satirical articles I wrote back then.

Then there was that warning, or threat, in Agresto’s letter, suggesting that I’d be killed if I returned to Sulaimaniya. The article, a bitter satire comparing the Bush diehards to “the Infected” from Danny Boyle’s zombie film 28 Weeks Later, was hardly likely to offend the Kurds; its targets were all white Americans. The only people who would want to kill me for that article were…well, John Agresto and his neocon comrades. So I took that part of the letter as a pretty direct threat that I’d be killed if I came back.

The rest was such gibberish that I couldn’t help wondering if Agresto had written it as a taunt, a “Nah-nah-nah” moment to savor, a chance to grind at least one of the detractors of his patron Cheney into the dust.

It was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. “Racism”? The only “racism” the article showed was in a paragraph in which I said disgustedly that African-Americans, as the only demographic to oppose the Iraq War, were the last sane group in the country, and that white Americans were “truly a nation of suckers.” According to the rules involving “racism” as I understand them, a white American like me is entitled to talk badly about white Americans without being called “racist.”

But the real shocker was hearing John Agresto talk about firing me for thought crimes. You see, John Agresto has only one claim to fame as an academic (not counting his role as bagman for The Agencies in Kurdistan). He became quasi-famous in rightwing circles during the 1990s as … take a guess. Seriously, what would be the most ironic predicate you could put on that sentence? That’s right: he became famous as a crusader against the tyranny of political correctness in American universities. If you enjoy truly awe-inspiring displays of hypocrisy, I invite you to read Agresto’s article, “To Reform the Politically Correct University, Reform the Liberal Arts.” In this brave treatise, Agresto argues that the key to returning freedom of thought to the university lies in bringing ideological diversity to the liberal arts — you know, English and so on.

Now he had taken refuge in the oldest, dirtiest trick in the PC censor’s book, accusing me of “racism” and “obscenity.” It was a little difficult to believe that Agresto really took concerns like racism very seriously, because he has a decades-old record of refusing to apply affirmative action guidelines in any job he takes. (He certainly managed to select a pure lily-white staff at AUIS.) In fact, Agresto’s article on reforming the Liberal Arts to eliminate PC is full of comments like this:

JOHN DOLAN’s true identity remains a mystery. He may or may not have co-edited the mordantly accurate Moscow-based The eXile with Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi in the 1990s, and he may or may not be the true author of the War Nerd columns, presented as coming from one “Gary Brecher”, a Gogolian dead soul working in Fresno who happens to love war.   Alternatively a paleoconservative or offended progressive idealist (he despises neocons), depending on his mood, he always delivers engaging prose.  Yea, no matter what the real name is, the man can write—about that there is no doubt. 
_____________________________________
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-dolan
[3] http://www.alternet.org/story/102992/
[4] http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/John_Agresto
[5] http://www.thefullwiki.org/As-Sulaymaniyah
[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/17/the-amazing-story-of-saxb_n_144307.html
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/iraq-0
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/kurdistan
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/john-dolan
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/aui-s-0
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/suleymania
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/american-university-0
[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B