Don Mitchell: "You Who are the Bureaucrats of Empire, Remember Who We Are"

(Courtesy of Michael Marchman)

"You Who are the Bureaucrats of Empire, Remember Who We Are"
by Don Mitchell
Department of Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University
History is a Weapon

The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University receives a large grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to run a program in National Security Studies (NSS). The Maxwell School boasts that its NSS program is the "Premier Professional Development and Training Program for the Defense Department." According to the NSS website, in the program "Senior Defense executives and senior military officers, entrusted with the responsibility of coordinating and implementing U.S. national security policy, are challenged to develop increasingly sophisticated management, leadership, and decision-making competencies" (http://www.nss.edu/Program.htm). Students in the course come to campus for several weeks where they are showered with gifts (fleece vests, field radios, pins, coffee mugs, golf tournaments, banquets) and instructed in the fine arts of management, case-study methodology, decision-making, war scenario development, pacification, and so forth. The course is met each year by protests by student and community activists, who find the University's links to the Defense Department to be abhorrent. In fact, this past fall, the head of NSS, Bill Smullen, called me into his office to try to get me to muzzle a student group I advise. He does not think protesting his program is legitimate. But he also knows he cannot win that fight on a university campus, at least not yet. A second strategy is to try to draw critics of the program into it. Smullen says instead of criticizing his program we should participate so that we can better see what they do and they can better learn why we are opposed to them. He told me in the fall that if we have criticisms we should bring them directly into the classroom so they can be contested by his students. In part for that reason, I was asked to prepare a presentation for one of the NSS classes. I was asked to come to the class to "give practical advice for the leaders of the Defense Department trying to plan for U.S. involvement in post-conflict societies." Below is the text of my remarks, presented on 16 April, 2004, at the end of the bloodiest week so far in America's occupation of Iraq. The response was interesting. Bill Smullen was as mad as I had ever seen anyone and he told me that my remarks were completely inappropriate and had no place in a classroom. One of this colleagues, Bill Sullivan who runs the Executive Education program within which NSS is housed, thought it was exactly what was needed. An instructor in the Army War College has invited me to lecture to his students. A participant told me I was a piss-poor geographer.

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