U.S. aid to rebuild Iraqi universities falls far short

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Washington Post

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"Like everyone else in America, I saw the images of people cheering as Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down. I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes," said Agresto, former president of 525-student St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M. "Once you see that, you can't help but say, 'OK. This is going to work.' "

But the Iraq he encountered was different from what he had expected. Visits to the universities he was trying to rebuild and the faculty he wanted to invigorate were more and more dangerous and infrequent.

His Iraqi staff was threatened by insurgents. His evenings were disrupted by mortar attacks on the occupation authority's Baghdad headquarters.

His plans to repair hundreds of campus buildings were scuttled by the Bush administration's move to shift reconstruction efforts and by the failure to raise aid from other sources.

His hope that Iraqis would put aside differences and personal interests for a common cause was, as he put it, "way too idealistic."

"I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality," Agresto said as he puffed on a pipe next to a resort-size swimming pool behind the marbled palace that houses the occupation authority.

"We can't deny there were mistakes, things that didn't work out the way we wanted," he added. "We have to be honest with ourselves."

Agresto's candor is unusual among the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. bureaucracy responsible for the civil administration of Iraq until June 30. He is one of the few U.S. officials in Baghdad to speak on the record at length about the shortcomings of the occupation.

Iraq's institutions of higher learning were once the most modern in the Middle East. But they were smothered under Saddam Hussein, then further devastated by looting after Saddam's government was toppled last year.

In his initial travels around Iraq, Agresto, 58, observed students sitting on the floor in burned-out classrooms. He visited technical colleges with no tools. He saw academic journals from the 1960s kept under lock at an agricultural college because the school did not possess more-recent books.
 
"It's difficult to describe how bad things were," he recalled.

Agresto found the universities needed $1.2 billion to become viable centers of learning and reap goodwill for the U.S. rebuilding effort. But of the $18.6 billion U.S. reconstruction package approved by Congress last year, higher education received $8 million, a tiny fraction of his proposal. When Agresto asked the U.S. Agency for International Development for 130,000 desks, he got 8,000.

"I really thought this would have been valuable money, well spent and sorely needed," he said. "We're not buying books for the libraries. We're not buying saws and nails for the technical institutes. We're not replacing the computers that were stolen. I can't be anything but sad about it."

Agresto, a lifelong Republican and political conservative, still believes in the U.S. invasion. He is proud of the changes the Coalition Provisional Authority instilled in Iraq's universities, including the promotion of academic freedom and a purge of senior officials of Saddam's Baath party. He says he believes the provisional authority accomplished "a lot of good under very difficult conditions."

While acknowledging U.S. mistakes, Agresto aimed some of his most pointed criticism at Iraqis. In his view, the United States toppled a dictator and prepared the ground for democracy, but Iraqis have not stepped up to build on that start.

"They don't know how to be a community," he said. "They put their individual interests first. They only look out for themselves."

Some American academics who are familiar with Iraq's university system blame the Bush administration, and Agresto, for failing to secure more independent funding.

They said that in choosing Agresto, the White House shunned scholars with greater acceptance in academic circles, many of whom had opposed the invasion, in favor of a conservative loyalist who had spent much of his career criticizing the U.S. academic establishment.

"Had it been someone different than Agresto, the possibility of that would have been so much better," said Keith Watenpaugh, an assistant professor of Middle East history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., who traveled to Baghdad last year to assess Iraq's university system.

"The politics of the occupation were so divisive, and the American academy felt so disempowered by the way things were happening, that when such political creatures like Agresto came asking for things, it was too difficult to put aside those politics," he said.

"If the administration had really been committed to rebuilding Iraq's education structures, they wouldn't have sent Agresto."