Faculty Sign Petition Against Invasion of Iraq

As University President Lawrence H. Summers and others on campus continue to trade blows over a recent petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel, faculty have begun to publicly line up on another controversial Middle East issue—whether the U.S. should invade Iraq.

Dozens of Harvard students and professors have signed an online petition opposing a military attack against Iraq, and two Harvard faculty members were among 36 political scientists who argued that an attack would harm U.S. interests in an advertisement in the op-ed section of yesterday’s New York Times.

The online petition was written by a professor at the University of Minnesota and gained hundreds of signatures there before Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, put it on the Internet on Tuesday, where it has gained over 3,000 signatures from students and academics around the country.

“I had been looking for an effective way to oppose this invasion of Iraq, because I think it’s dangerous and crazy,” Kanwisher said. “I felt like there would be more power in a bunch of academics voicing their opinion.”

Signers of the petition include Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs John H. Coatsworth, Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser, Professor of Greek and Latin Richard F. Thomas, Associate Professor of Linguistics Bert Vaux and Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr. ’59.

The petition argues that military action would be justified only if weapons inspections or other diplomatic methods have failed, and only then if the intervention had United Nations support.

Top American diplomats yesterday were focused on obtaining approval from members of the U.N. Security Council for a resolution that would require quick Iraqi compliance with comprehensive weapons inspections and would authorize military force in the case of defiance.

But France has said it supports two resolutions, the first one setting an inspections timetable and the second one authorizing the use of force.

Within the U.S. yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said the Senate would debate a resolution—backed by Senate Republicans—on Bush’s proposed use of military power next week.

Daschle has said the administration’s latest proposal, which gives Bush authority to use military force to protect U.S. security interests in the region so long as he informs Congress, remains too broad.

Faculty said they worried that the process was moving too quickly.

“I think we’re not having a reasoned debate on Iraq,” said Pierce Professor of Psychology Ken Nakayama, who signed the online letter. “There seems to be the mechanisms in place to just go to war, we’re amassing troops and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. I think we need to discuss and find evidence for the war and that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that the administration had evidence both that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and that he had funded chemical weapons training for al Qaeda operatives.

The comments were the most specific link between Iraq and al Qaeda that the U.S. has yet alleged.

But Harvard faculty said that evidence for al Qaeda ties remains vague and must be confirmed by the international community or the American public.

“The administration is tossing around this word ‘link,’ but what does that mean?” said Belfer Professor of International Affairs Stephen Walt, who signed the advertisement in the Times but not the online petition. “Does that mean one Iraqi intelligence agent might have talked to one member of al Qaeda, but we don’t know what he said?”

Walt’s Kennedy School of Government colleague Steven E. Miller also signed that advertisement, which was funded by academics carefully selected for their reputations as non-pacifists and argues that war with Iraq would divert U.S. focus from the greater threat of al Qaeda.

“This is a gift to Osama bin Laden,” said MIT professor Stephen Van Evera, who joined in signing the Times advertisement.

“Bin Laden’s strategy was, I believe, to provoke us into a war in the Middle East so he could mobilize the Islamic world,” he said.

Walt said he believed invading Iraq could provoke it to collaborate with al Qaeda.

“Bin Laden is an Islamic extremist and Saddam Hussein is a secular dictator—they don’t have a lot in common, their agendas are not very similar, and there’s no reason why you’d expect them to back each other,” he said. “I worry that [the U.S.] would be unwittingly giving them a reason to collaborate.”

Walt called Iraq a “threat, but not a serious threat.”

“If they do have weapons of mass destruction, they cannot use them without facing devastating repercussions,” he said. “Iraq is containable for the indefinite future, even if they were to require a handful of nuclear weapons.”

But Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse said Hussein’s past actions justified an immediate attack despite the political scientists’ predictions.

“This is not a man whose mind they know—what embarrasses them would certainly not be the same thing that embarrasses him,” Wisse said. “I’m sure that they would not have gassed thousands of Kurds.”

David B. Adelman ’04, president of Harvard Students for Israel, said while he favored military action against Iraq, he did not think the petition would be as controversial as the drive for divestment from Israel.

“I think this is nothing new, it’s something a lot of Americans agree with,” Adelman said.

Walt and Nakayama said that taking up Hussein’s recent offer to return weapons inspectors to the region was the logical next step despite Iraq’s past violations of U.N. regulations on inspection.

“Even if we can’t get 100 percent reliability, the mere fact of putting inspectors back in Iraq makes it much more difficult for them to sustain any kind of weapons program,” Walt said.

The petition can be found at www.noiraqattack.org.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.