Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable

As with all papers and commentaries presented during its annual meeting, the Organization of American Historians disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or of opinion, made by its panelists, moderators, and participants.

What follows is a transcription of the roundtable which took place Saturday, April 5 2003 at the 2003 OAH Annual Meeting in Memphis. The presentations are copyrighted by the individual presenter.

Eric Foner, Columbia University

Copyright (©) 2003. Eric Foner. All rights reserved.

I'm going to speak a little on a slightly different topic or angle of vision here, which I really want to address--how the war might affect us as historians. This question of how we function as historians may seem somewhat trivial or mundane while bombs are falling and men and women and children are dying, but the war, and by the war I mean in effect all the events since September 11th, do challenge us to think about our role as historians and what we ought to be doing as educators and citizens at the moment.

I think these events offer us--as historians--both opportunities and dangers. The opportunity is to try to drive home the importance of thinking historically in this society. Everything that is happening today--and especially since September 11, 2001--has a history, even though one probably wouldn't conclude that from listening to the media. Restrictions on civil liberties have a history. The stigmatizing of one group in the society for special treatment by the police, the government, etc. certainly has a history. America's relation with the rest of the world, including the Middle East, has a history. But rather than go into all of that, one particular trope of thinking about the world, which we do need to address as historians--and has become very popular in the media and by the punditry--is this notion of a clash of civilizations. That what's really going on in the world is this clash between something called Islamic civilization and something called Western civilization or maybe just American civilization.

This kind of thinking, which is so prominent today, really exemplifies the difference between thinking mythically and thinking historically. The notion of civilizations as presented, of course, derived from Samuel Huntington's book of the mid-1990s [The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1996)], and then picked up all over the place--the notion of civilizations in this way of thinking is static, ahistorical, essentialist. It takes up one characteristic of a society, whether it's religion or geography or political institutions, and then sort of makes that the total definition of the civilization. It completely ignores the interpenetration of cultures, the influence of one culture on another, which has been a characteristic of the modern world for centuries.

The notion of the clash of civilizations makes it impossible to think seriously about our own society. It's obvious that the notion of Islamic civilization is absurd. That concept includes more than a billion people stretching from Asia through Southeast Asia through South Asia through the Middle East, through parts of Africa and even into the Western Hemisphere. This is not a single civilization with a single set of values or political institutions or anything like that. What's of more concern to me as an American historian is that this concept makes it impossible to think about our own society and problematize it as we must when we're trying to teach American history.

Positing the other side as bad almost automatically posits us as good, which is fair enough as far as it goes but makes it difficult to think about the history of concepts of liberty and rights and equality and how recent and partial their triumph is in American society. And it makes it impossible to think about some of the dangers that we do face, even right now, which have been alluded to by a couple of the previous speakers.

The danger, which I think affects us as historians, not simply as citizens, are the efforts of both governmental agencies and private patriots to suppress freedom of speech, freedom of expression, in this time of crisis. In the last few days, as you know, former military leaders who criticized planning for the war in Iraq have been denounced for endangering troops in the field and warned to remain silent. A number of scholars, including myself, have been labeled on television and other places as "traitorous" or "traitor professors." If criticism of a war while it is in progress makes one a traitor, that category will have to include Abraham Lincoln, who denounced the Mexican War while serving in Congress. It'll have to include Mark Twain, who vehemently attacked the Spanish-American and Philippine wars at the turn of the last century. And since we're in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr., who was one of the first truly prominent Americans to call for an end to the war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Everybody here knows, I think, as American historians, that with the exception of World War II perhaps, every significant war in American history has inspired vigorous dissent. One can go back to the American Revolution and the War of 1812 and the Mexican War and the Civil War, and World War I, etc. You know all this.

Contrary to what you may see on television, these movements did not desire the deaths of American soldiers, nor does the anti-war movement today. Most of those soldiers joined the Army for many, many diverse reasons. The prospect of going to war was probably not the most important reason for joining the Army among most of them. These anti-war movements in wartime are part of the democratic tradition of this country, but equally persistent have been efforts to suppress wartime dissent, and again one can go down the familiar list from the Alien Sedition Acts to the massive suppression of freedom of speech in World War I, etc., etc. But what I want to focus on for a minute here is what this means for history, for the writing of history, for thinking about history.

The philosopher Nietzsche once wrote that there are three kinds of history: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. The critical is what we all try to do, that is history which is analytical and which tries to really get to the bottom of things. The antiquarian is what genealogists do, which is often of great value, and the monumental, of course, is celebratory history which simply exalts the society as a kind of place that began perfect and that has been getting better ever since.

Today as in previous times, self-proclaimed "patriots" are trying not only to determine the boundaries of acceptable speech about the present but to rewrite our history. And again, there is a history to that effort to rewrite history in wartime. I brought along a publication, a little pamphlet, issued by the Committee on Public Information during World War I, with the title "What Can History Teachers Do Now?" and one of the things--it lists many things history teachers can do now--it called for was helping people understand what democracy is by pointing out the common principles in the ideas of Plato, Cromwell, Rousseau, Jefferson, Jackson, and Washington. I would like to know what those common principles were, actually, but this is an effort to create a historical lineage for a sort of political military alliance which happened to come into being for very specific reasons of the time.

Today, also, statements about history that in normal times might be considered uncontroversial are regularly labeled treasonous. If you don't believe me, just click into History News Network, which regularly publishes scurrilous if not libelous attacks on various historians, including myself, often with no basis in fact whatsoever. That's their freedom of speech, but I just hope that no one here takes any of that stuff seriously.

Syndicated newspaper columns have said that I and other professors--including possibly one or two in this room--hate America. In my case, it was because I noted that Japan had invoked the doctrine of preemptive war as a justification for its attack on Pearl Harbor. This point was also made by another well-known anti-American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a recent newspaper column. Another comment that I made to a newspaper reporter who asked me, "Is this the first time the United States has gone to war without being attacked?" and I said "Well, no, I don't think so. Actually there have been many occasions in the past, including Vietnam and many interventions in the Western Hemisphere where the United States went to war without being attacked." Well, that also has prompted accusations of treason.

In the aftermath of the Civil War in a far greater crisis than today, the Supreme Court in the Milligan case invalidated, as some of you know, the use of military tribunals to try civilians in wartime. The court proclaimed that the constitution is not suspended during a war. It is quote, "A law for rulers and people equally in time of war and time of peace." But we, of course, have not always lived up to that stirring ideal. Our civil liberties, and this is one of the lessons of our history, and this current situation provides an opportunity to teach this--our civil liberties are neither self-enforcing nor self-correcting.

Today, historians view efforts in the past to suppress criticism of the government as shameful episodes, but we are now living through another moment when many commentators both in and out of government seem to view freedom of expression--including freedom of expression about history--as at best an inconvenience and at worst unpatriotic.

These attacks, these incessant attacks, on dissenters as traitors are intended to create an atmosphere of "shock and awe" within the United States, so that those tempted to speak their mind become too intimidated to do so. President Bush has claimed, as you know, that America's enemies wish to destroy our freedoms. If we surrender freedom of speech, including freedom of speech as historians, in the hope that this will bring swifter victory on the battlefield, who then will have won the war?