Monday, July 16, 2007

Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks

By Tom Hayden

"Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge? ......

The new doctrine was jointly developed with academics at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard. The Carr Center’s Sarah Sewell, a former Pentagon official, co-sponsored with Petraeus the official “doctrine revision workshop” that produced the new Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual [US Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, 2007]. The workshop was held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on Feb. 23-24, 2006, and can be accessed here......

....Sewall tastefully avoids any references to the brutal though targeted suppression necessary for the mission to succeed, but states in Ivy League language why she stands in coalition with the Marines:

“Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose. The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words will lack meaning…”

She goes on to make an ambiguous comment about the dirty war supported by US Special Forces in El Salvador, now known as the “El Salvador option”:

“Military annals today tally that effort as a success, but others cannot get past the shame of America’s indirect role in fostering death squads.”

The only sense in which the fostering of those Salvadoran death squads was “indirect” is that US forces went to great extremes to hide their role as advisers and trainers, the very role be carried out today by US advisers embedded in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, which is dominated by sectarian Shi’a Badr Brigade personnel.......

If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard, the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response."

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