Teaching for American in Iraq

What can one American do in Iraq—a civilian who may be ambiguous about the war, but feels an obligation to do something?

For an elite, educated, and well-connected youth with a social conscience, the impulse is to use the power of education for good. Ian R. Klaus, a graduate student in history at Harvard, arrived with his “feet on the ground, head in the sky” in Iraq in 2005, two years after the U.S. invasion, to teach English literature and American history in the country’s Kurdistan region.

His book, “Elvis is Titanic: Classroom Tales From the Other Iraq,” is a memoir of the semester he spent there: a reconciliation between historical realities and idealism, and a powerful documentation of the everyday lives of young Iraqi Kurds.

Klaus left for Iraq fresh from a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford and “Elvis Is Titanic” reflects his intellectual bent. The early chapters of the books are couched in the historic intellectual debate over Western involvement in the Middle East, as he cites everyone from T.S. Eliot to Noam Chomsky to the “9/11 Commission Report.”

Later in the book, when Klaus spins his experience teaching Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” into a lesson in cultural relativism, his book smarts are forced onto the reader—but in the early historical analysis, they orient rather than irritate.

While Klaus highlights the ambiguities of the U.S. presence in Iraq, he is even more painfully aware of the chance that his own presence there could do more damage than good. Is it imperialist, he asks, to be trying to spread the English language and American history during an American military campaign? Firmly committed to presenting an unbiased history of the U.S., he emphasizes the African-American experience of slavery and the struggle for civil rights. Yet Klaus also finds himself often defending the contemporary United States—and himself—against his students’ perceptions.

“‘Do you think I get any oil for coming here?’ I asked in half-mocking frustration,” he writes.

His very physical presence in Iraq presents a danger to those around him—as he gets to know his Iraqi bodyguards and their families, he worries about the constant threat he poses to them.

Ultimately, his status as a target forces his early departure. As it turns out, Klaus is not your ordinary American in Iraq—at the time the book place, was Chelsea Clinton’s boyfriend.

A British tabloid discovers that he is in Iraq and, in an ironic turn of events, an Oprah episode featuring Klaus is broadcast in the Iraqi town of Arbil where he is teaching. Suddenly his relatively low profile is blown; Klaus gets a personal taste of the impacts of globalization.

Globalization, with all of its possibilities for growth and advancement, as well as its potential for cultural loss, also provides the book’s irony and humor. The title “Elvis is Titanic” refers to one of the many East-meets-West exchanges that dot the book: Elvis and the movie Titanic are both well known in Iraq—select items of American culture that were readily available in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The memory of the former dictator is everywhere; as Klaus pushes his students to question globalization and its effects on culture, the overwhelming consensus is that being too open to the West is better than the isolating control endured under Saddam.

These episodes offer a valuable portrait of the Iraqi Kurds, a more nuanced image than that projected by the American media. Klaus humanizes an Iraqi population so often represented as either a group of innocent civilians or a band of dangerous militants, a body count or terrorist network. Through Klaus’ anecdotes, which reveal much of the personal experiences, ambition, and outlook of his Iraqi acquaintances, we catch a glimpse of the way a war, so far removed from our own lives, personally affects millions of individuals.

More specifically, Klaus’ account sheds light on an oft-ignored dynamic of the war: Kurdish nationalism. In the American fixation with sorting out Sunni and Shia, we often ignore this other group entangled in the political future of Iraq.

Kurdistan, while the only place in Iraq with the degree of stability where it is even conceivable for an American like Klaus to live and teach as he did, also provides an especially strong case for the dialogue on American responsibility in which Klaus engages. Kurdistan has been supportive of the American “liberation” to a greater degree than other parts of Iraq, but it is also indelibly marked with the history of a U.S. betrayal. In 1991, the United States encouraged a Kurdish uprising against Saddam, only to back off their support, leaving room for the former dictator to commit unprecedented atrocities in the region.

Klaus makes clear through the testimonies of his students the Kurdish fear of a repeat abandonment.

Klaus’ portrayal of the Iraq war is one of misconceptions and foiled expectations. The only solution he advocates is communication and understanding between America and Iraq—two countries now hopelessly entangled—and a recognition of their shared human fate.

—Staff writer Cora K. Currier can be reached at ccurrier@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.