Educating Iraq: New Schools and New Lessons for a New Nation

June 23, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. GERECHT:  I think we're going to start here even though not all of us have arrived.  But I'll do a very, very brief introduction.  I'm Reuel Gerecht, I work here, I handle the Middle East and other things.  But we are most honored to have, first John Agresto, who is a senior advisor on higher education out of the Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA.  Some of you may have seen The Washington Post piece that ran, was it on the weekend?  On Monday, which had the very felicitous phrase that he described himself as a neoconservative mugged by reality.  So, he will be giving us a little presentation on his time and after that, we'll follow with the other panelists.

We have Eleana Gordon, from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Hillel Fradkin, from the Hudson Institute; and we will be having Ahmed al-Rahim coming from Harvard, he's on a plane at this moment, or I hope, off the plane, actually.  And he will be here a little bit later.

So, with that I will start right away and turn the floor over to Mr. Agresto.

MR. AGRESTO:  I especially want to thank Walter Burns, who last time I was in town, bringing some university professors from Iraq on a tour of America.  He said, why don't you come out and give a talk at AEI.  And everybody thought it was a good idea, so thank you, Walter, I appreciate the thought.

Let me begin in the most boring manner and just sort of tell you facts and figures and give you some description of the university system in Iraq.

There are 20 major universities in Iraq and 43, what they call technical institutes and colleges, that are like our two-year vocational colleges.  All public institutions, there are very few private colleges or universities of any note left in Iraq.

I gather once Iraq had, probably, the very best higher-education system in the Middle East, especially in areas such as medicine, science, and engineering.  Now, the university system is, at best, you might say pauperized.  It was starved under Saddam.  It was starved under the sanctions, and it was terribly hurt in many places by the looting that followed the war.

There was no damage, to speak of from the war itself.  But incredible damage from the aftermath of the war, when the Iraqis looted their own--when the Iraqis looted their own universities and burned them.  Libraries burn, easily.

They're not like American universities, hardly at all.  The first thing to know about them, is they're highly specialized places.  One goes there to earn a degree  in a field and not to learn about the world, in general, or to see the world or to begin to understand new and different things, but to become an expert.

And this actually begins in high school, where you would be separated into one of two tracks: the more intelligent students being encouraged or forced into the science track; and the others being pushed into the culture track, as it would be called.  And still others who would be slated for vocational trades.

But you go to college--you go to university as they would say, and you'll leave a doctor or a scientist or an engineer or a lawyer; very continental, very British in its model.

There is, following from this, obviously, is there's no such thing as what we would call liberal education in Iraq.  There's no such thing as liberal education in America, but at least we talk--but at least we talk about it.  And we seem to think it's a good thing, even if we have not a clue what it is.

They have not a clue what it is, but are very curious about it.  Especially in the Kurdish areas, very curious about this thing called liberal education.  And I think the lack of it is something that will change, especially, as I said, up in Kurdistan.

But the answer I get very often and even from professors who I absolutely respect is why would anyone want to be anything other than an expert?  Why would you want to know all that other stuff that's of no use to making money or earning a living or being in your trade?  So that's, I think something that immediately struck me as odd, was the incredible specialization and the lover of specialization.

Now, this, of course, has a political effect.  And what I want to talk about today is both education and, to a degree, politics, as well.  In fact, a lot about politics.

I think without some liberal education to look for breadth of vision in the leadership of the coming Iraq, I think, will be difficult.  And I think they are beginning to understand this.  And if anything, the coalition in my office could do was to help them see that this was at least a problem: to have leaders who knew nothing about history; who knew nothing about economics; who knew nothing about political science; or philosophy; who had never read a great book; had no background of any imaginative fiction; that put those people in positions of leadership because they were engineers or doctors or businessmen.  That might not be the best for the country.  But more on that later.

The third characteristic is the incredible hierarchy of professions in Iraq.  Now, we have it, too, you know, basketball, at the top and but with them it's--there is science, medicine, and engineering and now, more recently, computer science are the queens of education, absolute crown jewels.  And underneath that, maybe law.  And then, underneath that, the social sciences and the humanities.

Whole universities will not have courses in foreign languages, other than English.  Whole universities will not have philosophy departments, political science departments; history departments; and Fields suggests comparative religion, absolutely rare, only up in Kurdistan are things like that beginning.

Furthermore, graduate education and teaching is much more highly prized than undergraduate education and teaching.  In fact under the old system, you got extra pay if you were in medicine, engineering, or science; you got extra pay if you had graduate students under your supervision.  You got no extra paid for teaching large undergraduate classes.  That was something that lecturers would do.  A real professor would not want to do that.

They have, because of this almost sanctity of the graduate schools, they may have the highest proportion of Ph.D.s to the general population in Iraq of any nation in the Middle East.  It may have the highest proportion of Ph.D.s to general population of any country in the world.  You can't walk down the street without tripping over a Ph.D.

And as I said before, the other thing to know is that all the good universities are public universities, not private.  There were very good private universities, religious universities, generally missionary universities over there before the '60s.  I mean the most famous was Al-Hikma University which was a Jesuit University.  And they also ran Baghdad College, which was a Jesuit prep school.  The best minds I met in Iraq, whether expatriate or within Iraq, all graduated from the Jesuit prep school.  One of my translators graduated from there and who would just, under his breath be reciting Macbeth, he never won the elocution contest, and that bothered him his whole life, that bothered him his whole life, but he would still--he had Macbeth memorized from the first page to the last and would constantly be repeating it.

Second point:  What changed with the fall of Saddam?  Given that is the picture now.  I think if you went there, despite the fear of religious  and political coercion, which is a real fear right now and a growing problem.  I think you'll find incredible openness, dialogue, intellectual inquiry.  There really is a--professors there have been disconnected with the outside world for so long and they're all desperately trying to make connections with what have they missed in the intellectual world.  What's going on in their old graduate schools, back, perhaps in the United States more likely and Great Britain, sometimes in Europe.

Travel is now everywhere.  One of the first orders Ambassador Bremer put out was that academic travel would not be stopped.  Under the old regime, clearly, you couldn't travel without permission, generally actually, from, it had to go up as far as Saddam through the minister.  Now, no one can stop a professor from going to a conference or a symposium or a meeting somewhere.

The other thing that's very different is--and we fostered this as best we could, the growing independence of the universities.  My predecessor Drew Urdman [ph], when he got there in April, there was no ministry at the time but there were universities.  All of them were open and so he brought together the university presidents as a council of university presidents, basically to govern the university system.  And that continued even when the ministry was set up and running.

I think that's a very important--the presidents now govern with the minister.  It is no longer that hierarchical, Stalinesque system where Saddam's on top, then there's the minister and the minister has authority to hire and fire at will.  But now the university presidents set policy and work with the minister.  And this is absolutely a major change.

When I first got there, I got there, I arrived there just about the time the minister was appointed, a guy named Ziad Aswad, appointed because of his political connections to the Sunni Islamic Party, connected to the Muslim Brotherhood--we'll talk about that in a while.

And the first thing he did was fire all the university presidents, because that's what, you know, a good Stalinist would do and to put in his own people and, I think one of the lasting accomplishments of my office was to tell him that he would retract that order or he'd be walking the streets.  That these were presidents selected by their peers; they were elected by their faculties, and then approved by the coalition and he may not, as minister, simply discard them.  And he then issued an order reinstating all the presidents.

Now, we have in place procedures for selecting presidents; procedures for selecting deans; procedures for firing presidents and I think we've actually done an incredibly good job in getting that in place.

We got--what else  happened, with the fall of Saddam?  There used to be quotas against women in the major fields--in medicine, in science, and in engineering.  There could be no more than 40 percent of any class, we've eliminated that and now the proportion of women in those is a little higher, but there's no longer any artificial quotas.

And, in fact, having gotten rid of the artificial quotas; having gotten rid of all the extra points you would get for being a friend of Saddam or a member of the Ba'ath Party or having connections to the Ba'ath Party through your parents.  First-year enrollment went up last year from 60,000-some-odd the year before to over 90,000, like 97,000, it was a 50 percent in freshman enrollment last year.

I think a lot of that had to do with the new openness and liberality.  And also the fact that good students could now get easy access to universities.  All universities, by the way, are free because they're public.

What else did we do?  We re-computerized the universities as best we could.  It's still ongoing, Internet connections are everywhere.  You go on the university, students are online.  Something unheard of under Saddam, but, basically, go anywhere they want over the Internet and I think that's a great bulwark against the onslaught of the oncoming radicalization that's out there.

We're slowly rebuilding the libraries, library collections.  I went to the--when I first got there about a week after I was there, I visited Tikrit University and I walked into the law school there.  Must have room for 5,000 in the law school.  My best count was there were 80 books.  And most of these were Xerox copies of Xerox copies of older books that were hand-stitched together and put on the shelves.  Basrah University Law School, for the last 15 years under Saddam, had  an annual acquisition, total number of about eight books a year.  This has now changed, there's sufficient money in the budgets for book purchasing.

And believe it or not, one thing we did with great break-backing labor, as my colleague Joe Falen [ph], would say, we carried most of the book boxes, we managed to get over 20 tons of books donated and given to the universities.  The British Council was far and away the best at doing this.  They sent, 13 of the 20 tons.  But American universities, some of them, and private citizens and professors stepped up and sent books [tape glitch--blank] --was sent, here we go, to something that they have called the declaration of academic freedom and conduct.  The universities have pledged themselves to be absolutely free of any sectarian or political intimidation or coercion; that they are under the control of no sect or party; that academic freedom; freedom of inquiry; freedom to write and to publish is sacrosanct; freedom to travel is sacrosanct; and that any attempt to interfere with this would be met with expulsion.

This has actually had some salutary effect.  They printed up this declaration, translated it into both Kurdish and Arabic, put them on great big posters, plastered them on the walls of the university.  This was actually in response to the fact that we had to cancel student-union elections this spring because some of the more radical, especially Sadrite students were threatening that any parties that ran against them, people would be hurt, killed, they wouldn't allow women to vote and that they would not allow any secular parties in the election.

And since we knew the elections would be you known, done under the shadow of fraud and violence, we had to cancel the student-union elections.  But that was the impetus for putting out this declaration.  And now in September, there will be student government elections and they will take place under this.  And my guess is that this will be a help.

The protection from intimidation and coercion I think is the first priority of the new minister.  The new minister is an absolute gem.  Unlike the old minister, we could talk about that if you want.

Problems?  Obviously, the first problem, as I saw it, was always the narrowness of their education, the narrowness of their training, actually.  Great for tyranny kind of dangerous for democracy.  And it's not only the insistence on a focused line of study, you know, scientists should read no history; a historian will never study philosophy; a mathematician will never read a book.

But the narrowness of the method.  That the method of instruction is, as you might guess:  Listen, memorize, repeat.  And come to the exam, if you repeat what the professor said, exactly as he said it, you'll get a good grade.  Any variation is a demoted.

I had an interesting conversation--no, I witnessed an interesting conversation with the president of Dohuk University, up in Kurdistan on the Northwestern part of the country.  And I was there with two translators and the conversation was in English.  And one of my translators was having an argument with the president, some political argument, I don't even know what it was right now.  My other translator said, stop them they're fighting.  I said, they're not fighting, they're arguing.  This is the first time, and I've been here now for about four months, it's the first time I've heard an argument in Iraq.  I very often hear people will get up, will state their position, will marshall their forces, will get the applause, and will win the argument on the basis of how forcefully they said what they believed.

But I had never heard an argument with reasons given, with premises examined and so on.  And I asked the university president, a guy named Asma Khalid, I said, why is this that I hear people fighting all the time and stating their positions, but I never hear people arguing for their positions?

And he said, you have to understand three things that are wrong with this country.  First is the religion.  You can't, it's written, it's said, and you can't question it.  To question it is blasphemy, you can't question it.

Second is the fathers.  You can't say to your father, I think you're wrong.  Because his father told him this.  And that's to say his father was wrong, so it would be impious to say to your father, make an account of yourself for, why do you say that?  Or give me a good reason why that's so.

And he said, the third and most important is the way we teach.  He says, the professor gets up, he says what he has to say, you write it down and you repeat.  You don't question him, you don't even ask him questions because that's to say he didn't lecture well, and you can't say that.

Whatever the textbook says is absolutely right.  And this method has so infected--which is the word he used--so infected the minds of the people of this country that I don't think we're fit to be free.

That was the most shocking think I could have heard.  And the real connection, then, between what goes on in education and what goes on in politics.  That we do not think for ourselves in this country.  I think he was excepting the Kurdish region, Kurdistan.

But we don't think for ourselves and we're taught not to think for ourselves.  We're taught in the mosques, we're taught at the home, and we're taught at the schools, don't think.  He said, how are you going to make a free country out this?  That was the most shocking conversation I had had up to that point.

Other problems that they have.  When I asked any professor what do you need most? 

Sometimes you would think they would say we need books or we need higher standards, okay, never heard that.  Or we need more computers, once in a while I hear that.  What I hear all the time is we need better faculty salaries.  That's the most-needed thing in higher education in Iraq is better faculty salaries?  We've just doubled faculty salaries.  And, in fact, the, full professors are now at the top of the national pay scale.  They get the equivalent of what justices of the Supreme Court.  They get more than emergency room doctors.

Then it dawned on me in talking to them, it wasn't that it was exactly they wanted more pay, more money, it was that the pay scale was insufficiently hierarchical, it didn't show enough respect for the degrees that they had earned; didn't reward their titles sufficiently.

A full professor doesn't get that much more than an assistant professor.  And lecturers, brand-new people entering the university, who have just--who are working on their Ph.D., perhaps, don't get much more than the secretary who had been there, you know, 20 or 30 years, might be getting.

And I actually asked one of them, once, do you make enough money?  No.  Why do you say that?  He said, I make what the secretary makes.  I said, would you want to make more than her?  Yes.  Would it be okay if I just lowered her salary?  That would be fine, too.

It didn't matter, so long as it was differential, it didn't matter what the salary was, so long as the respect was shown by how much money in difference was given.  And I would say to them, well, why don't you want more money, you know, you should publish, maybe you should consult, you should do something, teach extra classes.  Absolutely not, absolutely not.  We don't get paid because of our work, is the answer that would come back.  We get paid because of our position.

And on the one hand, this is a real political problem.  On the one hand, we know that a culture of dependency grows out of a tyrannical society; that tyranny has killed all their incentive to go and do and invent and become.  And on the other hand, we can't overlook what socialism combined with an entrenched elitist hierarchy has done to foster a culture of entitlement.

And so, I have grave problems and grave worries about the future of democracy when you have a both a culture of dependency and a culture of entitlement and not a culture of work.

Okay.  I mean, still, today everything is nearly free.  Oil provides 97 to 98 percent of the revenues of Iraq.  Gas costs about 3-cents a gallon and they don't produce it, they import it.  They export their oil and import their gasoline.  But yet it's totally subsidized so that gas is just 3-cents a gallon.

Food baskets, everyone gets their food basket, rich or poor.  Free electricity, free water, no taxes.  If they would just tax cigarettes 5-cents a pack, they'd be the richest country in the world.  You should know, I think $3 a carton for cigarettes or less.

So we have a hierarchical subsidized anti-work--2:00 o'clock comes, the ministry is gone, everybody goes home.  During Ramadan, there's even less work, during Asura there was no work.  The governing council spent, I must say, half it's time trying to figure out when the next holiday would be.  It was, in some ways, sad and funny and disgraceful all together.

We have a society with no initiative, no independence of action, no acting without permission.  I could talk more about that, but coming out of a tyranny, it would be--it would, they forever wanted me if they wanted to do something.  They forever wanted me to sign a paper giving them permission to do what they knew they were supposed to do anyway.  They always wanted to have somebody's name on a piece of paper that they could blame in case somebody questioned them.  No, the senior advisor told me to do it.

And I think all of this has a political effect.  Now the truth is we made mistakes in--and the CPA made mistakes in Iraq.  I mean, there's not question about it.  We put together a governing council of 25 people decided that these 25 people should represent the stakeholders of Iraq.  Stakeholders, okay who are the stakeholders?  I mean, the lawyers, the doctors, the businessmen, the grocers, the housewives?  No.  No, no, the stakeholders are the leaders of the parties and the sects.  The sects, the religious sects.  Those are the stakeholders of this country?  I actually wrote this and circulated it around CPA at one point.  We're more than happy to do exactly the opposite of what Madison does in Federalist 10.  We seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them.  Instead of geographical electoral districts where we might hope to encourage the development of moderate candidates, we gather together the representatives of the most antagonistic factions and think that's good democracy.

We've done nothing to blur the lines separating people and everything to sharpen them.  We will not see moderate and thoughtful people, representing the wider interests of Iraq.  Rather, we'll see idealogies chosen for the very reasons that they were not mild, moderate, or thoughtful, but because they were ideologues.  It's the corruption that comes with being comfortable with affirmative action as a way to govern.  Solidify factions an then proportionately empower and reward those factions.  And I think that was the most damaging thing, politically, that we did.

The second mistake was a tendency to think that democracy is easy.  Democracy is not easy, tyranny is easy.  Tyranny may even be natural, democracy may have to be built.  Democracy takes a thousand ingredients; democracy is hard.  And this is, again, part of what I wrote way back when.

America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule.  Just let people go and there  you have it.  Democracy.  But all the ingredients that makes it good and free, limited government; separation of powers; checks and balances; calendared elections; staggered elections; plurality selection; different terms of office; federalism with national supremacy; development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility; and, above all, the breaking and moderation of factions--all this we forget about.

We act as if the aim is democracy simply and not mild and moderate democracy.

Third, and this is not our mistake:  I'm sorry to say, you may need a democratic people before you have a democratic government.  I mean, John Adams once said that, give him a band of highwaymen and he could make a republic out of it so long as they were watching over each other.  And I think that's just far too optimistic.

Unless people are willing to work for something in common, rather than be merely self-interested, I don't think democracy will work.  We're over there as CPA right now and have been for months now, trying to build civil society there in Iraq; trying to shore up women's organizations; NGOs, various non-profits; various civic groups; trying to get Boy Scouts, begun, you know, things like that.  And maybe it'll work, maybe.  Maybe it won't.

Again, the tyrannical culture of dependency and hesitation and the socialist culture of entitlement, I think those things stand in the way.  But there's more than that, it's more.

Iraqis always say that the suicide bombers are not Iraqis, that Iraqis love life too much to blow themselves up.  And I think that's probably true.  But that's a double-edged sword.  Iraqis won't go out and die for a cause, blow themselves up for a cause, but they also won't die for their country.

There is so little what I see as self-sacrifice on the part of the Iraqis.  I see lots of love of family; lots of love of tribe; lots of love of religion; but I see very little love of neighbor, very little love of countrymen, very little love of Iraq.

It's the only country I know that doesn't seem to have any patriotic songs.  They don't sing about their country, that's so bizarre.  They were happy to be liberated, don't think twice about that.  But don't forget, we liberated them they did not liberate themselves.  And I think that's at the heart of our problems.

None of this, as I say, applies to Kurdistan, which is so radically different and so lovely in a sense from the rest of Iraq.

The other thing that makes politics difficult is--and this is understandable--a fear of strong leadership.  I mean, remember we set up the governing council, every month there's a new president.  You get one chance out of 25 to be president.  It just rotates among all the members.  Now we have a prime minister and the president with the lines of authority seem to be blurred.  But the truth is, I don't know of any democracy that began or any that were revived without democratic leadership.  I mean, Hovel, maybe Karzai, Washington, Lincoln, I mean, it's very difficult to imagine a country becoming a democratic country without the leadership, certainly, if we reflect to the leadership that we were lucky enough to have here.

I think their fear of leaders is understandable, but I think it's wrong and I think they will have democratic leaders or they will have tyrannical leaders, but they will have leaders.

Last, and this is Larry Diamond's point and he's absolutely right, it's certainly hard to establish a democracy without security.  Elections?  How, how?  Who will serve?  So many are killed.  I know so many who are now dead and I only was there for nine months.  But I think the new prime minister's absolutely right.  I mean, when he talks about establishing marshall law, it should have been done a long time ago.

Talked about the return of capital punishment?  Absolutely right.  I think I even heard that he wants to go out and find the people that Saddam had fired and then rearrest them, something we've resisted because the rule of law declares that people legitimately pardoned by a legitimate sovereign are truly pardoned.  Iraqis don't understand what the heck that means.  These are killers and murderers and they're going to walk the streets because Saddam pardoned them?  Well, yeah, they were legitimately pardoned.  But this rule of law's kind of goofy.

But I think it's right to say there is no democracy without security and without some law and order.

In the end of my, you're going to say, you know, how do I think it'll turn out?  I have no idea how it's going to turn out.  On one hand, I can be fairly optimistic.  I think higher education is absolutely going in the right direction.  I think from the things I've said and the things I've seen that's one sector that is far and away better than almost any other sector I know.

The new government is extremely, so far better than the old government as to not even be comparable.  And it's a new government not based on party.  I mean, they talk about this is a technocratic government that sounds awful, but it's actually a way of getting around party government.  and these are people put in there because of their competence.  And sometimes because of the generality of their views, and their attachment to Iraq rather than their attachment to a particular sect or party.

And the new government seems to be saying the right things.  That leads me to be fairly optimistic.

Pessimistic, I'm not sure I'm seeing the development of decent leadership, but that may happen.  The security situation is increasingly sad.  Is there an ability of the Iraqis to act collectively for the public good?  I don't know.  And is there understanding that a constitution doesn't confer power as much as it limits power?  That's one things not understandable that in that country.

I mean, we think of democracy as  protection of rights and they think of democracy as power to the majority.  And they're in favor of it, if they're in the majority.

Okay, I've said more than enough.  I've said way more than enough, I'm sorry.

MR. GERECHT:  Well, thank you very much and actually, you.  Actually, I'm not sure you have said enough because I'm going to take my position here and abuse it.  And try to get you to say a little bit more an then I'll pass it off to the panelists.

And I'll just pose three quick questions to you.  On the issue of what you described as the affirmative action mentality on the part of the American administration, the CPA.  Do you think that came from any one person?  Ambassador Bremer?  Do you think it came from the bureaucracies, particularly the State Department and the Pentagon, or do you think it was just the path of least resistance?  And that's why the Americans went down that way?

Also, I mean, I'm curious, culturally and operationally in your work, did you see any differences between the Sunnis and the Shia or they were more or less indistinguishable?  And I had one other question, what was it?  Oh, yes, in The Washington Post piece that ran on you, there was a suggestion in that piece that one, American, the American higher-education universities have not given themselves fully to the project in Iraq.

Do you think that is an accurate description and how would you respond to The Washington Post's critique or suggestion that you were in fact the wrong man for that job, that your presence was too provocative and that led to American universities not being as forward as they might have been.

MR. AGRESTO:  Do I look like a provocative person?  Come on give me a break, go to hell, geez.  I described as shorthand affirmative action, come from?  It just came from, I think, I don't think any one person.  And it was sort of a mind set of the CPA and I came into it too late.  When I came in the CPA had already set up the Iraqi governing council.  They weren't going to listen to me anyway.  In fact, I tried to offer my services to work with the governance people and on the writing of the new constitution and on the interim and they said, no, no, no, no.  Work with higher education.  So I was sort of stiffed on that.

But where does it come from?  It comes from this kind of a mind set.  Single-party rules, that's bad.  Two-party rule, that must be better.  Multi-party rule, that must be the best.  and it's just, I mean, the ease with which they would say multiparty democracy, like that was the best thing.  It all went together like milk and cookies, peanut butter and jelly, multiparty democracy.

Well, that, clearly, had to be the goal.  You'd certainly want that more than you'd want two party democracy.  It just struck me as people who didn't understand what made their own country a good and lasting democracy.  And, so again, I don't fault them, I fault the--they had based educations.  They didn't study what Walter, that's why, they had bad educations.

Sunni/Shia differences?  It's amazing how sharp those differences are, especially in the educated class who tended to be far more Sunni than Shia and who would have no hesitation in calling Shias animals.  The minister, who was a Sunni Muslim, once we were talking.  And he said, did you see those people beating themselves with chains?  I said, yeah, I saw it on TV.  He says, animals, animals.  He says, now, worse than animals, even animals don't do that to themselves.
 The culturally gulf between what I saw as, at least the educated Sunnis and the Shias--had one of my absolute favorite professors, vice president of one of the universities, went on the hajj and the first time he had ever mingled with Shias in his whole life.  He lives in Kurdistan and he always--and he said he couldn't believe they were singing a song that called the Angel Gabriel a traitor for giving the Koran to Mohammed and not the Allah and I'm not well, enough versed.  But he said how could they sing this about the Archangel Gabriel?  They called him a traitor in the song.  And he would never have anything to do with them.  So, I think the differences are real.  And I don't know, whether, you know, they'll--it's real enough that they will come to fisticuffs over it, but I imagine they will.

And--whether they would have done more.  If somebody else wanted the job, somebody else could have had it.  I'm more than happy to have given it away.  I mean, I was sitting over there, and, you know, breathing in dust for nine months and getting shot at is no fun.

I mean, I was just always amazed by this, you know, American universities would have stepped up to the plate if Agresto wasn't there.  Huh?  Okay find them, have them tell me this, you know.  No one ever told me this.  And, in fact, the university I most--I usually condemn the most, Duke University, was, in fact, the university that sent over 4 tons of books all by itself.  I had fine relations with universities of, you know, if you want to put them across a political spectrum, across a political spectrum.  I think this was just a comment by this one person who was trying to say why he hasn't done anything for Iraq.

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you very much.  I'm going to go around the panel.  And I'll give each individual about five minutes and then I'll open it up to questions and I'll just start over there with Ahmed al-Rahim.  I hope your flight was okay.

MR. RAHIM:  Fine, thank you.  I'd just like to talk about my last experience in Iraq, which was in March.  I had attended a conference on civics reform and that's where I met John.

And this issue of sectarian divide, I think is at the heart of the problem with the civics curriculum there in secondary schools.  And the problem is the civics curriculum is taught from a faith-based Sunni approach.  And I gave a talk there on teaching religious pluralism in the new curriculum, where I suggested that they do a--where they write a history of religious experience in Iraq that bridges the gap between these sects.  And the response was very interesting.  A lot of the older generation, curriculum developers--this conference was attended mainly by curriculum developers in the Ministry of Education.

The older generation accused me of wanting to convert them to Christianity, because I had suggested that we learn about the history of Christianity in Iraq and the history of Yezidism and other religious histories in Iraq.

And in the conversation with this one particular curriculum developer, I realized that she was Sunni.  And I asked her, now that Iraq will be a democracy and there will be elections, what will you do if the Shiites come to power and decide to shove their religious history down your throat.  And her response was, praise be to Go, we're all Muslim's there's no such thing as a Sunni or a She.  And complete denial about these kind of sectarian suspicions that exist that John had just laid out.

And, though I think you can't divide Iraq into--I mean, I think one of the problems with our policy has been to look at Iraq through a kind of sectarian lens that there are the Shiites, the Sunnis and among the Shiites, we can deal with Sistani and we can't deal with Muqtada al-Sadr and that's basically it.

Rather than dividing Iraq into a class structure, because my experience there is that within Baghdad, you've got different--you've got Shiites and Sunnis who are in the same class and who share  similar values.  And I think the big question is when and if there will be elections, I don't think that the Shiites will necessarily vote as one block.  I think it's possible that you're going to have voting based on sort of class interest.  And this has been, I think, a miscalculation by the CPA in looking at Iraq.

The other curriculum developers, the younger ones, actually were very excited about this idea.  And my hope is that American academics, American curriculum developers will be able to work with that generation to write a civics curriculum that is not based on faith, but that is based on history that presents Islam in it's historical diversity to eliminate some of this extremism.  And I think that's possible.

I have one question for John.  I was involved in putting together a proposal for Harvard for a U.S. aid request for application to partner with Baghdad University.  And I found it very, very difficult to do at Harvard.  I had worked with--I worked to try to bring together faculty from the School of Public Health, the Center for Middle East Studies, Business School, the Law School, and I found it most difficult in my own faculty in the Center for Middle East Studies.

And I found, there was a lot of resistance.  And a lot of it, I think, was based on ideology, not interested in the current administration, not looking at the problem in Iraq as a humanitarian problem.  And in some sense, I think, not wanting things to succeed there, because of their hate for the current President.

And it never got off the ground and I was very frustrated and I ended up leaving in the summer and not completing it.

The other issue was it's--as Harvard is a bit hierarchical, there was interest to bring in ambassadors to be Chief of Party.  And my suggestion to them was that Iraq, frankly, is full of ambassadors who are not doing a lot.  And you need people who know the country, who know what to do and--and you can get the work done.  So, my question is, what do you think--

[End Side 1 Tape 1 -- Begin Side 2 Tape 1]

MR. AL-RAHIM:  --can they play in helping Iraqi universities rebuild?

MR. AGRESTO:  The thing that Iraq universities want most and Iraqi professors want most, and I actually wrote this in the article that appeared in the Chronicle, three months or so ago, is contact with the outside.  They want to get fresh in their fields again.  They want to go to conferences.  They want to see what they've missed over the last 35 years.  And, what we spent a lot of time doing was trying to put together partnerships, USAID, put together five of these partnerships, we were trying to put together more and since we had no money, of course, we're not USAID, we relied on the good will and generosity of American universities.

And it's amazing how many universities actually did step up to the plate.  I think by the end there were probably 20 universities who, in one form or another, in one way or another, in their own way or another were helping.

This went from anything, from as I mentioned, Duke University, which was basically sending all the acquisition books out of their libraries and, you know, copies of books that their professors that no longer wanted and just sending them over to Baylor University doing, and has been doing for a while, some very good work up in the Kurdish region.  East Tennessee State, Western Michigan, sending over people to work in the medical field.

The problem is, and I had to be honest with people in American universities who wanted to go over, was that the security situation was so threatening that I could only encourage them, at this point, to work with the Kurdish universities and not work with the Arab-Iraq universities.  And that was sad because the Kurdish universities are in some ways already superior and better and, and more advanced than the ones around Baghdad, itself.  But there was just no way to encourage American professors to come in teams to Baghdad University responsibly.  One of my best friends was almost killed leaving Usansaria the other day.  And he's in Walter Reed Hospital now.  It's a very difficult situation there.

But the American Universities different departments--rarely a whole university, like Baylor or East Tennessee State or Western Michigan, but different departments at various university have stepped up to help.  But sorry to say, I couldn't really encourage them to go to far, south of [inaudible].

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you.

Now we'll go to Eleana.

MS. GORDON:  Thank you.

Just as a way of quick background, I've been spending the last 18 months working primarily with Iraqi women on democracy.  But the main interest is not women's rights for the sake of women's rights.  It's been to encourage democracy. And one of the issues I have been working with, with Iraqi women activists leaders is to see the connection between democracy and their rights.

I went to Iraq for three weeks in October of last year.  And during that visit I helped organize a conference for almost women.  This was sponsored by the CPA.  It was a four-day conference on democracy in women's rights.  There were delegations from the south.  Many of the delegates, most of the delegates were Shia Arab women, but we also brought in delegations from Kurdistan and Baghdad.

And during that trip I also traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan, Baghdad, and I interviewed human rights activists, democracy activists, people who had been in the opposition to Saddam and were coming back or had been in safe haven working for democracy.  And I was curious to know what their level of understanding of democracy was.

So I would just ask them, some of the people I interviewed, to get and idea where Dr. Fuad, who was the head of the Constitutional Committee at the time, the head of the Kurdish women's union, the Kurdish human rights association, some of the women who are now ministers in the interim government, and I just asked them what is democracy?  How would define it?

And I found that their understanding was intuitive, but rather shallow.  They knew it had to do with freedom.  They were very excited in particular about their freedom of expression I think because maybe that was the most tangible change in the post-Saddam era was their ability to speak freely.  And they knew it was connected to human rights.  And, again, probably because that was the most glaring problem of--or their most tangible experience with tyranny was a violation of human rights.  And they knew that it had to do with electing leaders.

But they were missing some very critical concepts that, perhaps, even members of the CPA were missing.  And maybe we need to add to our understanding of what liberal democracy is.  Ideas such as separation of powers, checks and balances, the world of individual liberty, the fact that you also have to maintain minority rights and protect from tyranny of the majority, the connection between political freedom and economic freedom and free market, a constitution, all of these ideas were not well known, were not understood.  And this concerned me because I thought this is the elite that is going to be building the democracy in Iraq.  And if they don't understand what the pillars are, the institutional pillars are, we're not off to a good start.

And this was confirmed to me by Kanan Makiya, who I think you all know as the author of A Republic of Fear.  He really dissected what the Saddam regime was about.  And he said to me that he was concerned that the members of the constitutional committee did not have a good grounding of what should go in their constitution and what constitutes a real democracy.

So I think this is one of the challenges that I wanted to point to, which is a lack of understanding of liberal democracy among the elites.  Added to that, I experienced at the conference for four days, we really had the chance to speak with 200 women and get a sense for what their frame of mind was and the filters through which they thought of democracy.  And I'd like to just address very quickly some of the challenges that I found, but also some of the opportunities.

Many misconceptions about what democracy is.  This idea that democracy merely means majority rule, that came across very strongly.  Another misconception, the idea that democracy means I can do what I want, whenever I want.  Apparently the leaders often would say that.  Well, this is democracy.  I can do what I want.  And that's really, you know, concerning because it, especially when you look at the lack of security in Iraq in the last year, meant there is a fear and a sense that democracy means chaos, democracy means a lack of order.  And they have seen that in the last year.  And so there could be a rejection of democracy on that basis.

There's also, related to that, a lack of a sense of a social contract that you, democracy doesn't mean that the government does what you want at every particular moment.  It means that you play by the rules with the understanding that there's a process whereby you can try to change the government, change the laws, lobby, and do it peacefully.

But we saw in the conference, itself, a certain rejection of authority.  You can't tell me what to do is sort of a reaction to tyranny.  And the conference gave us an opportunity to introduce the importance of having rules and process, but it wasn't something well understood.

Another issue, which I don't think we've talked about a great deal today, is a tremendous confusion over the role of religion in a democracy.  We had a debate on separation of religion and state.  And it was, it was interesting for me to see, first of all, there was a fear, many of the women there are religious and very sincerely, genuinely devout.  And they immediately took that to mean that as religious women they would not be allowed to participate in politics.  So there was a very strong reaction to this idea.

So it brought home to me the importance of really being clear on what separation of religion and state means, and maybe even more importantly religious freedom.  After all, three are models of democracy that don't involve absolute separation of religion and state.

There was also fear of secularism, a fear that democracy would mean a model, such as in Turkey or in Tunisia, where the women would be forced to remove their veils.  And I think that's a deep psychological fear that we need to be aware of.  There was also just, the women in particular really trusted their religious leaders.  They had been the ones who stood up to Saddam.  And there was a sense that it was the secularism and lack of religion that had caused so much of the tragedy that they had suffered.  They had also suffered from religious oppression.  So there was a lack of a sense that politics can corrupt religion and that religion needs to be saved or protected from politics.  Instead, I think, there was more of a sense that religion was going to save politics.

Now, some of the opportunities, however, that I do want to highlight as well.  I actually saw a tremendous amount of self-initiative and organization which surprised me.  Because I expected for a nation coming out of tyranny, the sense of entitlement, the lack of ability to take self-initiative.  But in the post Saddam era, the women that did not wait for permission to create organizations.  And hundreds of women's organizations were formed.  Sometimes just two or three women, but taking it upon themselves to try to create their own factories.  They want economic self-sufficiency.  It's something they are very hungry for.  Organizing themselves to help war widows, to help orphans, to document the mass graves.  I mean, this was something that happened organically coming out of the Iraqi society, which was very encouraging.

And the women at the conference were not shy.  They were not afraid of expressing their opinions.  And we saw debate as much as we saw fighting.  And I noticed that we had at least a framework for beginning discussion, which was an agreement on freedom of expression.  Because that had been so readily embraced.  We had women who disagreed almost, it could have been violent, I think, but we had as a premise, anybody could speak.  And so they had to take their turn.  And that was helpful to begin a debate.

I also saw a deep hunger for knowledge.  I mean, women from Naja, who were completely covered in a hijab, were reading the Swiss Constitution that we gave them.  It was the only constitution we could find in Arabic.  And they read every single word.  And they were peppering us with questions, what is federalism?  I know you have federalism in the United States.  How does that work?

And that told me that we shouldn't be shy about sharing our ideas.  One of the questions here, the premise was how do we promote democracy without being colonial.  And I think we should just get the ideas out there and not worry that they're coming from America or they might be tainted because people were so hungry to know.  And some of the women said to us, we know democracy provides freedom.  And we know some of the most successful and prosperous countries are democracies, but what is it?  Tell us what we need to know and tell us what we need to know so that we know what to put in a constitution.

A few other advantages:  Iraq's youth.  It is a young country which hopefully means it's malleable.  Maybe.  The English-speaking abilities, I was shocked that after some years of isolation, I met so many people who spoke English very well.  And then, I think the Iraq's diversity could be its advantage if we can--and its common experience of tyranny.

John made a really interesting point about the need for a common mission, I think, to tie a country together.  There's a potential here for a common mission.  I don't know if it's been tapped into.  But the potential here is a shared history of oppression and tyranny.  And that can bind people together in wanting to create a new system that would avoid or prevent future tyranny and an understanding of Iraq's diversity.  There's only one system of government that can work when you have such an ethnically and religiously diverse country, and that's democracy.  Otherwise, when you have such large groups, if any group is going to dominate, it has to do it through tremendous violence and oppression.

But what is lacking, however, is an understanding between the groups of their suffering.  We saw this particularly between the Shiite Arab and Kurdish women.  They do not know about their respective experiences.  They know about their individual suffering as a group.  And something, again, Kanan Makiya mentioned, was the importance of educating the Iraqis about their common history of tyranny.  They don't know about this.

So I would suggest probably one of the things to focus on in building a foundation for democracy is to have education of their own history to begin with, documentaries, the kind of--a corner of the holocaust museum that Kanan Makiya wants to build.

And finally, encouraging more grass roots practice is something Larry Diamond has pointed out, which is one of the successful, sort of the successful steps in Iraq has been to the extent that there have been city-level democracy.  And that's when, and we saw it also at the conference, when they start to understand these concepts of give and take, compromise, debate, rule of law, because they practice it themselves.  Thank you.

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you very much.

Hillel?

Ahmed?

MR. RAHIM:  I think what was just said is very, very interesting.  And interesting because I think it's an added corrective to what I was saying in some ways.  She's absolutely right.  The people who I saw take initiative and the only people I saw take initiative other than the Kurds were women.

If you go over to the Iraqi Assistance Center over in the convention center, it's run by women, invented by women, put together by women.  They do seem to be the people, for one reason or another, that are taking initiative and not sitting back.

But one further comment on democracy is whatever I want to do, that--you're absolutely right.  If there's one thing that's given freedom a bad name in Iraq, it's the view that freedom means no laws, no restraints.  Freedom means that whatever side of the street you want to drive on is a matter of personal preference.  And I would have translators who would drive me around saying, "See what freedom does.  See what freedom does.  Car crashes, that's freedom."  And unless there's some understanding that that's self-government meaning some governance of the self, again, I have great worries about the future.

But I'm glad you said what you did about women, because that really is a difference.

MR. GERECHT:  Hillel?

MR. FRADKIN:  I just wanted--I enjoyed listening and learning from John so much that I want to continue.  And I basically just want to ask a couple of questions.  But I want to underscore this essential point of yours, that there is a very strong connection between what the educational experience of Iraq was and its political experience, not only because of Iraq, itself, but because it's representative of the situation in the region as a whole.  That there was, as you put it, I think, this form of education specialization, the focus on sciences is very good for tyranny but not very good for democracy.  And that was an implicit premise, but probably explicit too when autocrats and tyrants got to thinking about how they were going to organize their educational system.

They did think it would be, of course, very useful to them to have scientifically skilled people.  They also thought--and that proved to be the case, especially in Iraq where one did, in fact, notwithstanding all the deprivations, have extremely talented and skilled people in the sciences.

They also thought it would be non threatening.  And, there, I think the situation, the consequences have been more mixed.  Because it is a remarkable and noticeable fact which has been noticed by a lot of people and is worth discussing that an extraordinary portion of the radical leadership, the leadership of radical Islam comes from--is constituted by people who went through training in the sciences.

I mean, someone was actually trying to figure out whether there's a direct connection between engineering and radical Islam.  There are so many engineers who find themselves in that, going that route.  So this is a general thing.

And the other general thing, which is of course as you mentioned, the absolute starving of the social sciences but also especially the humanities.  And in particular it seems to me, and this goes on a point that Eleana just mentioned, the real lack of knowledge of history, of anyone's history, but especially one's own.  Which, which it seems to me can't help but foster another factor which is often observed and lamented, the indulgence in real fantasy, rumor and conspiracy theories so that the understanding of the world is really not, is not fact-based.  And can be in a way--it's consistent, I think, with what you were describing before about your experience in Kurdistan, you know, the notion that conversation proceeds by declamation rather a statement of what one believes rather than an argument from facts.  That this is really has been very damaging to Iraq but also to the region as a whole.

And it seems to me actually if one could figure out a way, and no doubt you're the person to figure it out, how to get--jump start what was a very venerable discipline in the Moslem world the study of history.  And get history written and studied and argued.  And that would be very, very important.

Which leads me then to my question, because it seems to me what you're describing in Iraq has, you know, is really portentous for the whole question of the region as a whole.  And it's obvious that people talk about the fate, the political fate of Iraq being very consequential for the region.  And it seems very much, by your account, to turn on its educational state.

And leaving aside what you've eloquently described as the problems, and so forth, what would you identify as the real things we could do educationally, I mean in some general way and also, perhaps, in some very particular ways?  I'm thinking on the particular side of your efforts and observations about the attempt to get American institutions involved or the American public involved.  It's been--and this is just a simple question.  I don't know if it's worth pursuing or not--it's been noticeable, for various reasons, that one of the problems we have in delivering on certain things in Iraq is because of insane bureaucratic log jams, delivering money, you know, and so forth.

In certain areas, the American public and various enterprising Americans have found their way around this place, establishing websites for, you know, schools and wherever.  I mean, some local I think Marine colonel set up a website and solicited, you know, thousands, maybe even millions of dollars worth of goods for refurbishing the local school and the local civic center. 

Considering the difficulties you had and it was mentioned in The Washington Post, getting aid either authorized or delivered, does it make sense for us individuals either simply members of the public or members of the academic public to strike out on our own and try to do something in this area while something can still be done?

And in connection with that one other thing.  You've mentioned that it's kind of--you can't really recommend that American academics go to Iraq to help, except in Kurdistan, for the obvious reasons that security is poor.  Well, if we can't go to Iraqis, can Iraqis come to us?  Would that help a lot?  I mean, would it be helpful if American Universities and other American institutions set up programs to bring Iraqi educators here for that experience, just the pure experience of what a different academic environment is like?

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you.  Excellent.  Great questions.

MR.          :  Interesting you mention the websites that some people have.  There are civil affairs offices over there in Iraq.  And they will remain as long as the military is there.  So they'll be there for many more years.  Who are doing exactly what Hillel said, setting up websites, letting you know where, indeed, you can send stuff to an Army base.  And the Army base will bring it over and they'll pick it up in Baghdad.  They'll pick it up at the Baghdad Airport, or wherever.  Or they'll be shipped up from Basrah.  And they'll see to it that it gets distributed.

I could give you horror stories about what some things the military did in Iraq.  And I could also tell you stories where nothing good would have been accomplished without at least the civil affairs officers in the military who have done incredible things.  I mean, just the other day I left one guy was putting together a fishing tournament in the Tigress for, you know, for Iraqi kids.  Where do they get these ideas?  Or one guy setting up an agricultural extension services at all the ag colleges, because they have no idea about agricultural extension.  But this is a civil affairs officer who happened to be the agricultural extension agent for the State of Florida.  So he's doing what he knows best, and he's bringing it to Iraq.

These are marvelous things.  Computers coming into various, you know, majors and captains and lieutenant colonels and being distributed.  We actually set up a website, in fact, Joe Falen set it up because I'm totally ignorant of how to set up a website, Iraq Universities.org, Iraq Universities.org.  And it gives you some civil affairs contacts in there.  Mostly we're thinking of where you might send books, but you can send other things as well.  And they can pick these up and distribute them.  So, yeah, that's one thing you can do.

One thing I wish I could have done better was that three universities, the three Kurdish universities are each of them starting a competitive private university.  The one in Irbil will be a comprehensive liberal arts university.  The one in Sulaymaniyah will be a college of economics and business administration, but with the liberal arts base.  And then intriguingly President I mentioned in Dohuk, President Asma wants to set up a college of humanities and democratic studies.

And they've raised a lot of money of this.  Mostly they've raised it within Kurdistan, the college of business administration Sulaymaniyah has hundreds of acres of land and over $7 million that he's raised from the provisional government, from the provincial government and from private people in Kurdistan--in Sulaymaniyah.  A little bit less money raised in Irbil for the comprehensive liberal arts college, but land given.  And the guy in, the President of Dohuk setting up a college of humanities and democratic studies.  And this came about because he, he realized exactly what Hillel was saying, what wasn't being taught was, you know, literature, philosophy, political science, political philosophy, and above all, comparative religion.

And I had a discussion with him at one point and I said, are you really going to set up a college that has comparative religion in it?  Are you going to teach the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible?  He said, of course.  With the Koran?  Of course!  I said, will you have a Jew teach the Hebrew Bible?  Of course!  Why not?

He said, I want this to be a college where everybody will come from all around the world.  It will be taught in English because that's the new universal language.  That's the new Latin of the world.  And everyone will come here.  We will have American and British professors and they will learn history and philosophy and political science and comparative religion.  Somehow swimming got in there too.  He wanted to have courses in swimming.  I have no idea why.  I think he had read that Columbia once had swimming as a requirement in its course.

So there are places that are safe.  And these are safe places to go to if American professors want to go and help.  I would suggest flying in through Turkey and coming down, rather than going through Baghdad and going up.  And the purpose of three universities is not to make Kurdistan better, but very charitably to make all of Iraq better.  These will be the seed beds of the future Iraqi professors.  They will not be taught in Kurdish.  They will be taught in English in all places.  And these will be the professors who will then be the professors in all of Iraq in the future.  And they have this as a mission of theirs.

The last question you asked was, you know, can Iraqis come here?  It's a wonderful idea.  Yeah.  We restarted the Fulbright Program.  They restated the English [inaudible] fellowship program.  We tried to get American universities to step up to the plate and bring over graduate students who had research projects that they couldn't finish who had done all their course work.  That was only moderately successful.

But to invite over professors and to invite over graduate students is an extraordinarily fine thing to do.  What you run across, however, is the difficulty of homeland security.  Even I, trying to get seven--six university presidents and deans and professors to come over, I still ran into incredible trouble with homeland security, even though the State Department was backing the trip.   If you're doing anything like this, if you're connected to a university and you want to bring your professor over to have him be with you or even teach a few courses, you've got to start at least a year ahead.  It may change a little once Iraq has its own, governs its own passport system, but at our end the homeland security is very, very difficult to get through.

MR.          :  Ahmed, can I just ask you, you will have an embassy soon in about, what, nine days?

MR. RAHIM:  Right.

MR.          :  In Baghdad.  And would it make sense to try to set up within that embassy a concerted, an office that was concertedly interested in promoting that kind of exchange?  And which would, which would, I mean, there's bound to be some push back from the homeland security, but if there's any way institutionally to deal with it, it would seem to be through a Visa service within our embassy.

MR. RAHIM:  I would think that would be a wonderful thing to do, building upon Bremer's, you know, order number eight that encouraged faculty to travel and to see the rest of the world and to build themselves up again.  It can't be done without travel.  Going to Great Britain is much easier.  Going to Europe is much easier.  It's just coming here that it's so darn difficult.  But I think that's a wonderful idea, Hillel.  And let's keep--see what we can do to promote that.

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you.  I'll just add I think the American Visa system now is absurd.

All right.  I'm going to now have questions.  Remember, there needs to be a question.  If there are too many and too long of dependent clauses, I will cut you off.

MR.          :  Stick within the legal limit.

MR. GERECHT:  Yeah.  Maybe three dependent clauses.  If you can identify yourself when you have a question.  I'm going to allow this panel to go a little bit over time since we started a tad bit late.  So, anyway, if anybody has questions, please raise your hand?

The gentleman back there?

MR. KOSTOPOLUS:  Good morning.  I'm Phil Kostopolus from the Journal of Democracy.

My question, actually, I think it's mainly for Dr. Agresto.  Is there anything in Iraq or anything developing like the phenomenon of people going away to college?  You know, is there any prospect that young Shiites would go to the Kurdish region to study or vice-versa?  Or do people just sort of go to the, you know, the big, free, ex-Stalinist run state university that's in their neighborhood of birth?  Thank you.

MR. AGRESTO:  Most of them go to their local neighborhood universities.  Except if you score very, very well on the graduation exam and you want to be a doctor, then you want to go to Baghdad University because they have historically the finest medical school.  And so people will travel.  There are dormitories.  Baghdad University right away has somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000 students.  And my guess is that only about 6,000 to 10,000 who live in dormitories.

But, yes, you can travel.  Depending on what kind of a grade you got, that tells you what you can be in your life and where you might go.  If you didn't do that well to go to Baghdad University Medical School, but you did well, you'll wind up going to Alkort [ph.] or Candisea [ph.] or one of the other lesser schools.  So there is travel.

There was actually a program this year that the Kurdish universities would try to take at least 5 percent of students from, of their students from Arab Iraq and the Arab universities to take 5 percent of their students from Kurdistan.  It worked less well than it should have.  But at least the thought was there.  And the thought was also to raise that to 10 percent, and then continue going up.

There was a thought to have lots of interaction between the two regions.  It's just very difficult.  And since much of the instruction outside of the sciences in Kurdistan is still in Kurdish and a lot of the, honestly, a lot of the Kurds coming out of high school speak no Arabic now, that becomes a difficulty for a lot of, a lot of motion that way.

MR. GERECHT:  Question?

[Inaudible.]

MR.          :  Two questions, please.

It seems like from your description of Iraq society, which from my own experience there I very much agree with, maybe what needs to be done is courses in the art of questioning, because it's not a question of universities.  It's how do you question.  It's not universities.  It's not school.  Because it really starts with the basis of social fabric, which is the family, because you don't question your father.  If you go into an Iraqi home, you see this.  How do you--it's going to take them a long time to get to this.

Now, I wonder if you look, for example, from a Sunni perspective where the gates--

MR. GERECHT:  Harold, dependent clause alert.

MR.          :  Yes, sir.

Simply because Sunnis thought has encouraged--Shiite thought, rather, has encouraged the idea of independently critical thought and reasoning.  Sunnis thought has really, these doors have been closed for a thousand years.

Have you noticed in your experiences any difference between reasoning among Shiites as opposed to Sunnis?

MR.          :  I don't know that I have, to be honest.  And I'm generally at fault by not asking people what branch of Islamic religion they are.  And so it always comes as a surprise to me whether one person is one or one person is the other.  And if they're from Kurdistan I'm pretty certain, or if they're from Fallujah, I'm pretty certain they're Sunnis.  If they're from, you know, Basrah or Kut or Najaf, I'm pretty certain there.

Let me just say I think you're right they don't know how to question.  And this brings back the point that was raised before.  They live on rumors.  And there's no rumor too wild for them not to believe.  I once said before Saddam was captured.  There's $25 million on his head.  Why don't people, somebody turn him in?  That's a lot of money.  And the answer was, I heard this from numerous sources, it's too much money.  They'll kill you if you take that kind of money.  I said, what?  They said, that's what happened to the guy who got the $30 million for handing in Saddam's sons.  I said, what happened?  I said, they gave him the $30 million, right?  Yes.  They gave him the $30 million.  And the soldiers brought him with his money, American soldiers taking him to Turkey and in the valley between Iraq and Turkey they killed him and took the money away because they have families, you know these soldiers.  I said, you believe that?  He said, well, sure.  It's okay.  It's okay.  It's $30 million.  Nobody should be allowed to have $30 million.  But the soldiers, they have families, it's all right.  And they're American soldiers.  You don't really believe that?  You don't believe he was carrying $30 million in 20 dollar bills or something?  Everybody believes that.  I mean, the rumors are incredible.

At some point, maybe, if we had time I want to talk about the fact how it's not--the whole question of speech and argument is so much richer and deeper than this.  On one level I might even want to say, I'm not sure I've ever been told the truth by an Iraqi.  And on another level what I mean to say is I'm not sure Iraqis understand what we understand by telling the truth or more particularly telling what the facts are.  The idea of telling the facts as somehow related to telling the truth doesn't--I'll give you an example.

When I went to see the minister, or he was minister for about a week or a week and-a-half.  And I said, "How come you didn't go to Ambassador Burma's meeting with all the ministers?  You're the only one who didn't go."  And there's lots of reasons why he didn't go.  And I think he didn't want to have anything to do, be seen as a collaborator in any way, even from the very beginning.  But he said, "Well, you know, the army came to my house last night."  I said, "I did not know the army came to your house last night."  And he says, "Yes.  The army came to my house and they kicked in my door and they threw me to the ground and they stepped on me.  And they tore the place apart.  They terrorized my wife and my children.  I was terrified.  I was too shaken up today to go to the meeting.  I couldn't go.  I have to be forgiven."  I said, "Really, the army did this to you?"  He said, "Yes.  I don't know why they broke into my house."

So I say, I looked into it, the army said, no.  What we did was we saw people with guns outside this house.  We went.  We checked up.  They had their weapons cards.  We found that it was a minister's house.  He's a new minister.  We knocked on the door.  We told him that's why we were there, not to be concerned.  And we left.

Then I went back to the minister and I said, "Okay.  Let's tell the army to apologize for the terrible things they did to you."  "Oh, no, no, no.  No apology is necessary.  No.  No.  No."  I said, "It's not really true what you said."  "Oh, yeah, it's true."

And then I realized the facts weren't true.  The army told me the facts.  I mean, that, that was exactly what happened.  But he was telling me something that he knew to be true.  The army came to his house and he was terrified.  And the only way he could do this in the land of Sherizad [ph.], is to tell a story that got at the truth, even though it never got towards the facts.  And he wanted me to know how terrified he was at the sight of soldiers at his door.  And the only way to do this was to make up this story.

There's lots of things about speaking in Iraq that are interesting and different and disconcerting, from rumors to no understanding of facts, but a deep understanding of what you have to do to get the truth across, even if it means what you would think of as a lie.  But it is the land of stories.  And it took me a while to understand that.  But once I understood it, then I realized I'm not sure I've ever been told the truth as Americans understand the truth by any Iraqi.  So there's lots to talk about in this area.

MR. GERECHT:  The gentleman right there?

MR.          :  --Freedom Institute.

I agree very much with your point about the centrality of this inability to question authority.  And I wanted to pick up something Hillel Fradkin mentioned about the fact this was not always the case in the Moslem world.

You mentioned that they won't question the father and they won't question the religion.  But I notice in the Koran there is a criticism of people who won't question their fathers.  The policy is to engage polytheism because that's what they found their fathers doing and saying, what, even if your fathers were without guidance.

So my question to you is, has any thought been given to, as an educational technique, to tie in the religious principles found in the Koran for questioning authority as a means of changing the attitudes in the educational system?

MR.          :  Not that I know of.  But that's a very interesting point.  Something I hadn't known or thought of before.  And I'm sure it will be picked up at some point--especially if you and the Menorah Freedom.  And is my friend, Ohmar, here today?

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR.          :  Yeah.

MR.          :  He's back in Baghdad.

MR.          :  Oh.  But, no, that's an interesting point that I didn't know about.  And will it be picked up?  I have no idea.

MS. GORDON:  If I could comment on that.  At the conference the university brought in an Islamic scholar, supposedly, who started to lecture the women about their proper role in Islam and that they really should be in their home.  And some of the women finally stood up and said--oh, and he also said, don't listen to these ideas.  They're coming from America.  You shouldn't listen to these ideas.

So a number of women covered with the Hijaab said, "It says in the Koran to go as far as China to get knowledge.  So who are you to tell me who I should get knowledge from?"  And to your point.

MR. GERECHT:  The lady in the front?

MS. SHIM:  Diana Shim [ph.] of the New York Times.  I have actually two very quick questions for Mr. Agresto.

One is, has there been any sort of effort to tie what you're talking about, sort of this changing of the psychology and the mindset before the students reach college level?  Is anyone discussing this at the K to 12 level where I would imagine a lot of this really takes shape.

The question is, what do you think happens after June 30th?  You know, you were talking about all of these sort of reflexes toward majority rule and not thinking about minorities, and so forth.  Do you think that once power is handed over that those sort of cultural things will kind of reassert themselves and all of this kind of hope for a new way of doing things will weaken?

MR. AGRESTO:  I honestly don't know that June 30th is a magic date in any way.  By in large all authority has been handed over already.  It's, June 30th has now become a symbolic date.  All the ministries have their own power back.  Most of the senior advisors have left.  Some are staying as, you know, technical consultants to ministries.  But my ministry, for instance, that had the CPA ministry that had 11 people at its height will leave behind 2 people, one in the embassy to work on scholarships and exchanges and Fulbrights, and another to work at the ministry office to help with computers and budgetary matters, and so on.  So we've basically, we have already dissolved.  So I don't think June 30th in any more than a symbolic way will make a change.

I will give you later the e-mail addresses, phone numbers of the people who worked in the education ministry.  Iraq, oddly, and one of the very countries that does it, separates education from higher education in its ministries.  And I worked with universities and technical institutes and colleges.  But Leslie [inaudible] and others worked in primary schools and secondary schools.  I would give you an off the cuff answer and they would give you an intelligent answer.

MR. GERECHT:  Hillel?

MR. FRADKIN:  I thought it might be useful to pass your question on to one of our other panelists, Ahmed al-Rahim, because Ahmed, himself, has worked in this area in Iraq, but especially his wife has worked there and is continuing to work with elementary and secondary education.  So, perhaps, you could say something Ahmed?

MR. RAHIM:  Would you mind actually repeating the question?

MS.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR. RAHIM:  Okay.  What I will say about that is back last, well, February 2003, USAID was extremely ambiguous in setting out curriculum reform.  And the idea was that we would write the curriculum here, in a sense, and bring it to Iraq. When we got to Iraq in June, we realized that that was completely unrealistic.  That you had to work with curriculum developers there.  And that the curriculum that would be used in that coming school year--there was not enough time to develop and write a new curriculum.  And so the old curriculum was used, the one under Saddam minus civics because that just, there was no way of--if you took out all the references to Saddam and the Bath Party, there would be nothing left.  So civics wasn't taught.

And the rest of the subject areas were taught.  And there was an interesting exercise that students went through the first day is they tore out the pictures of Saddam.  Many of them were afraid of doing this, as you can imagine, but they were told that it was okay.  And I think actually there is something quite good about using the old curriculum to transition to a new one.  Because it has to do with [inaudible], how you teach it, how teachers point out what is wrong with it, why we're going to be thinking in a new way.  So, and for the coming year, there hasn't yet been a new curriculum written.  So it will still be the old curriculum under Saddam adapted somewhat.

MR. GERECHT:  I'm going to take one last question.  And then unfortunately I'm going to have to wrap it up.

The gentleman right over there?

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

John, first of all [inaudible] balance of democracy.  And the question is really for John, but for anyone else on the panel.  If I understood correctly, I think you made some reference earlier in your talks about a different level of preparation, if you will, in the Kurdish thought for democracy and the rest of Iraq.  And my question is, is there some way of accounting for that, first of all?  And second of all, is there some way to draw some understanding from that, that would be useful?  And what does the federal arrangement--but what is the federal arrangement for [inaudible]?

MR. AGRESTO:  And I will have others answer this as well.

The reason Kurdistan could develop the way that it did was under the protection of the no fly zone, they, they were very expert at building up their businesses, were working together.  They have a sort of a natural free enterprise spirit about them.  And also, unlike the rest of Iraq, they really do have a kind of community spirit.  I mean, they--while the KEP and the PUK will fight, and they don't fight wars against each other, they still recognize themselves as a people and that they're all in it together.  And they really will sacrifice for one another.  And the Pushmogas [ph.] are not afraid to fight and die.  I mean, they, they will.  hey find themselves a, a smart, always interested in the intellectual life and the academic life, community, and they find themselves a real community that was protected both [inaudible] and economically and--

[Begin tape 2.]

MR.          :  I worry.  I'm quite a partisan of the Kurdish north.  I think they're getting everything pretty much right.  And I just hope that when everything shakes down the world doesn't find them less free than we found them when we went in.

MR. GERECHT:  I want to thank, and particularly Mr. Agresto, and then everyone else from the panel.  I'm going to call it quits there.  And I hope you've got something out of this.

Thank you.

[End of taped conference.]