I was at the University of Baghdad yesterday, where we (other foreign participants in a conference on civic education) met with the university president, some of the deans, and some of the faculty. It was interesting, although I found it difficult to read the Iraqis and to gauge the depth of their commitment to changing things. The place is, like everything else I’ve seen, remarkably grandiose and astonishingly shabby: elaborate parks and ponds and grounds, much covered with overgrown weeds and trash.
I went with a group to the Green Zone last night for pizza and beer. It seems that the biggest danger is entry (thanks to suicide bombers) or exit from the Green Zone (where the terrorists wait and tail single cars coming out. The first soldiers to meet you are members of the new Iraqi Army, rather than U.S. GIs.
We’re going over to the CPA headquarters today and then will have the main conference with about a hundred Iraqi participants (and simultaneous translation) tomorrow.
My remarks will focus on two themes. First, the importance of education in changing expectations as a tool for getting out of a suboptimal local equilibrium (I won’t use such fancy language), namely that no one can afford not to win power, since the costs of trying to gain it and losing are that one loses everything. If education can change the expectations, so that people will not expect to lose everything if they lose an election, they will be less likely to threaten to annihiliate the losers if they find themselves the victors. Second, the necessity of fashioning an Iraqi historical narrative of the struggle of liberty and law against unconstrained power. Since the meeting will take place in the Gilgamesh Room of the conference center, I’ll mention the Epic of Gilgamesh (and the role of Enkidu in limiting the arbitrary power of the king), the first written expression of the idea of liberty (ama-gi in Sumerian; my tattoo was taken from a clay tablet found in the city of Lagash [contemporary Telloh] around 2300 BCE), the code of Hamurrabi, the role of the Baghdad Caliphate (destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1258), and so forth. It’s important that liberty be seen to have native roots and the story of liberty against power to be an Iraqi story. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that liberty and the rule of law will grow and flourish here.