Another Year, Another War

The grainy flicker of exploding bombs lit up television screens across the Harvard campus March 19. News stations broadcast dim green views of downtown Baghdad as it faced the most powerful air force ever to fly in combat.

Like the news from reporters embedded with American and British troops, the reaction of students and professors to the invasion of Iraq was fragmented and often contradictory.

The day after a squadron of American stealth bombers opened the war with a failed decapitation attack against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Matthew R. Skomarovsky ’03 spent the morning making last-minute preparations for a student walkout from classes to protest the war. As a leading member of the Harvard Initiative for Peace for Peace and Justice (HIPJ), he helped bring about 1,000 students, professors and others to a midday anti-war rally in Harvard Yard.

Jeffrey C. Munns ’03, a midshipman first-class in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and former president of the Harvard Defense Forum, says the ROTC schedule remained unchanged. He spent the day “probably like most people on campus, watching the television.”

“I know for all of us in the ROTC program, [the war] was very close to us,” says Munns, who was a battalion commander last fall. “People who we knew were over there fighting and involved in the area, in danger.”

For another Harvard military man, Lt. Jake Heller ’99, the second day of the war brought front line action.

According to The New York Times, Heller participated in a successful Navy Seal assault on two Iraqi offshore oil terminals in the Persian Gulf.

“We’re going to change the world tonight,” Heller reportedly told the men under his command. “Let’s do it right.”

United States troops surged across the Kuwaiti border on Friday, March 21, and seized part of the southern Iraqi port town of Umm Qasr.

Declaring that Saddam Hussein had ties to international terrorism and was hiding biological and chemical weapons, President Bush ignored strenuous European objections to military action. He invoked a new doctrine of preemptive strikes against nations that threaten American security.

Despite the war’s popularity in the nation at large, the conflict found strong opposition on campus.

A Crimson poll of 400 students taken March 20—the day after the war began—showed that 56 percent of students were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to the war. Thirty-four percent of students said they supported the war. Almost 10 percent remained undecided.

But Harvard’s opposition to the war was not unconditional—slightly more than half of those surveyed who said they were opposed or undecided said they would have supported the war if the United Nations Security Council had explicitly backed U.S. military action. The poll had a margin of error of 4 percent.

Shortly after ground troops entered Iraq, most students left Cambridge for spring break.

When tanned and rested undergraduates returned a week later, American tanks were bearing down on Baghdad, and business continued as usual at a campus where the student opinion on the war remained sharply divided. The fighting, which lasted less than a month, was brief and decisive. But at Harvard, the clarity of America’s military victory has done little to bring together the fractured views of students and professors.

The Road to Baghdad

Protests against the war started long before the troops crossed the border.

On February 12, local poets, including several Harvard faculty members, organized anti-war readings as part of a national Poets Against War day.

The debate intensified in the days just before the war started. On March 13, several student groups, including HIPJ and the Harvard College Democrats, organized a protest in front of the Science Center. The roughly 350 participants listened to speeches by professors and students, who denounced President Bush’s hard-charging foreign policy. Bush made a speech on March 17, giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate or face invasion. As the deadline neared, six experts gathered at Harvard’s ARCO Forum to discuss the war.

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident and director of Harvard’s Iraq Research and Documentation Project, said American soldiers would be embraced by the oppressed Iraqi populace.

Although there were some spontaneous outbursts welcoming American troops, widespread looting and lawlessness has poisoned relations between Iraqis and the occupying American troops in the last few months.

By March 21 the war was in full swing and the Iraqi people were not rising up against Saddam.

That evening’s fierce air strikes, hinted at by Washington as likely to induce “shock and awe,” were the war’s most intense yet. Over a thousand bombs were dropped.

When students returned from spring break on March 31, little of the spirited activism of the opening of the war remained.

The Harvard Republican Club (HRC) began tabling outside the Science Center the Monday after spring break and distributed 800 American flag pins over the course of the week.

HRC also participated in a rally on April 5 in Boston Common to support the troops.

Most of the subsequent war-related events on campus were held at the initiative of faculty members.

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Tad Oelstrom, who directs the KSG’s national security program, hinted during a panel discussion April 2 that Iraq was only a small part of a much larger American plan.

“Iraq is more of a short term piece of a much, much longer run of war on terrorism,” Oelstrom said.

The next day, U.S. troops reached the Baghdad International Airport, only a few miles from the city center.

Even as the conclusion of the war began to near, professors pressed for discussion of Harvard’s investment in companies providing war materiel.

More than 20 professors presented a petition to a meeting of the Faculty on April 8 questioning Harvard’s holdings in companies such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Several of the petition’s signatories, including Lecturer on Religion Brian Palmer, also favored divestment from such companies.

“Suddenly the University was in the position of…making a handsome profit from war, and that needs to be reflected upon,” Palmer says.

Jack Meyer, Director of the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), said divestment was unlikely.

The issue quickly became moot. By April 9, the day after the petition was presented, the Iraqi regime was in its death throes. Baghdad was increasingly under U.S. control.

The first official meeting of various Iraqi political constituencies was held on April 15 to begin plotting the country’s future.

A Culture of Spectatorship

A culture of spectatorship grew up around the conflict, according to Palmer, who spoke at the 1,000-strong anti-war protest in the Yard March 20.

“The ratio of combatants to spectators has declined over the past century as new technologies have made it possible for a nation to wage war with relatively small military forces,” Palmer says. “One implication of moving toward higher and higher tech warfare is the creation of a situation where war is for many citizens mainly a matter of spectatorship, even of entertainment.”

Skomarovsky, who was actively involved in several protests, still says there was an opportunity to disconnect from the war.

“I felt that the war had almost no practical bearing on our ordinary day-to-day lives,” Skomarovsky says.

Despite this distance, Skomarovsky lauds students for trying to make a difference.

“Here there were so many people, certainly among students, who cared so deeply about the war and its consequences, who were deeply politicized and followed what was going on,” Skomarovsky says. “But I think most people felt fairly powerless about affecting the war.”

Munns, the ROTC midshipman, says that the media did not give an accurate depiction of the conflict, but praises the aggressive reporting of many news organizations.

“I think it was also sort of revolutionary, in that no other war has ever been reported this way,” Munns says. “You had unprecedented access.”

Not Everyone a Spectator

Some Harvard affiliates actually rode into battle, and others had their lives interrupted by the war.

There was Keller, the lieutenant who helped the Seals to capture the two Persian Gulf oil rigs. He was president of the A.D. final club before graduating in 1999.

Ruben Marinelarena ’02-’04 was the only Harvard undergraduate to be called into service. The Lowell House resident and lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve left Cambridge in January. He spent the duration of the war training in North Carolina, and is shipping off to Okinawa for training in jungle warfare this week.

Molly C. Bingham ’90, a freelance photojournalist, was taken into Iraqi custody from her hotel in Baghdad on March 24.

A week later, Bingham was released from Iraqi custody at the Jordan-Iraq border. She had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

Bingham is currently back in Baghdad, where she is working as a photographer covering the reconstruction for The New York Times. The Harvard Business School (HBS) interviewed and accepted First Lieutenant Joe Finnigan while he was still deployed in Iraq. The interview was conducted during a sandstorm with a satellite phone belonging to an embedded reporter.

Army Captain James F. “Jimmy” Adamouski, 29, was planning to attend HBS in the fall. However, Adamouski was the first West Point graduate to die in Iraq, after the Black Hawk helicopter he was piloting crashed. Five other American soldiers died with him.

“Jimmy made such a difference in his life and his future was looking so great with the opportunity to attend Harvard,” his father, retired Army Lt. Col. Frank Adamouski, said in April. “There is no limit to the contributions he could have made to the future of this country.”

Reconstruction and Recrimination

Despite the military victory, many of the goals of the war remain unresolved. No solid evidence of chemical or biological weapons has been found in Iraq, and Saddam’s ties to international terrorism have not been proven.

The Iraqi people have been liberated, but lawlessness and radical Shiite clerics threaten to overwhelm progress toward the development of a stable government.

Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs Ashton B. Carter, who has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy, said in March that the United States would be “vindicated when we are able to hold up and show the chemical and biological arsenal that is the cause of this war.”

Now, Carter says he thinks his analysis of the war has been borne out by events.

“I think eventually we will find ample evidence that Saddam Hussein remained interested and active in chemical and biological warfare,” Carter says. “I said the weapons of mass destruction aspect was real, but we were likely to bollix the aftermath. And that’s what it appears we’re doing.”

A week after the fall of Baghdad, the American death toll stood at 125, with 36 of those deaths listed as accidental. Thousands of Iraqis died in the American and British assault, although their exact number will probably never be known. With the American occupation soon to enter its third month, Iraq is no longer making daily headlines. And at Harvard, the disagreements over the use of American power continue to divide students and professors.

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.