Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal writer and neoconservative advocate for military intervention in Iran (Photo: Northeastern.edu)
Americans badly need sober and well-informed analysis of Iran. They have been weaned on decades of television and movies that demonize Arabs and Muslims, including Iranians, and U.S. corporate media remains averse to some basic facts.
So it’s generally a good thing when a foreign policy institute comes up with the idea to educate American high school teachers on Iranian politics. But how about when two of the educators are ardent advocates of regime change in Iran?
Over the weekend, the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) brought together 44 high school teachers from around the country for “a professional development conference on ‘Understanding Iran and the Geopolitics of the Middle East.’” The teachers came from 39 schools across 21 states.
Here’s the e-mail announcement for the event I got, minus the list of schools participating:
On Saturday and Sunday, October 27-28, 44 high school teachers
from 39 schools across 21 states will attend a professional
development conference on “Understanding Iran and the Geopolitics
of the Middle East.” (List of “Schools by State” is provided below.)Sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Madeleine and
W. W. Keen Butcher History Institute and FPRI’s Wachman Center for
Civic and International Literacy in association with the Senator
John Heinz History Center and the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh,
the conference will be held at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.Through these history weekends, FPRI seeks to provide teachers with the larger historical, geographical and cultural context of contemporary
international affairs — in this case the question of Iran. Information about FPRI’s educational programs is available here or http://www.fpri.org/education/Top scholars and writers in the field will address the teachers,
including —Amin Tarzi, Director of Middle East Studies at Marine
Corps University, on “What Every American Needs to Know about Iran”Farhad Kazemi, Professor of Politics and Middle Eastern and Islamic
Studies, NYUJohn Calvert, Associate Professor of History, Creighton University,
on “Shi’ism and the Islamic Republic of Iran”David Crist, Senior Historian for the US Government, on his new book
“The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict
with Iran”Roya Kakakian on her book “Assassins of the Turqoise Palace”
Sohrab Ahmari, Assistant Book Editor at the Wall Street Journal, on
“The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Islamism”Lawrence Husick, Co-Chair of FPRI’s Center for the Study of Terrorism,
on Understanding Stuxnet and Other Cover Resposnes to the Iranian
Nuclear Program”Michael S. Doran, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy,
The Brookings Institution, on “The US and Iran in Geopolitical Perspecttive.”FPRI’s Butcher History Institute is co-chaired by Pulitzer Prizewinning
historian Walter A. McDougall and David Eisenhower.
The vast majority of the scholars are reputable. But two of the scholars who educated high school teachers about Iran last weekend are proponents for overthrowing the Iranian government: former Bush administration official Michael Doran and Wall Street Journal opinion writer Sohrab Ahmari.
Doran taught a session titled, “The US and Iran in Geopolitical Perspective,” with Ahmari lecturing on “The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Islamism.”
Doran is “close to militarist factions in the Republican Party” and “has advocated a passel of ‘regime change’ policies targeting the Middle East,” according to Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies that tracks hawks on the Middle East. He served as Former Deputy Assistant Secretary under the Bush Administration and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
In January 2010, Doran took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue for U.S. support of the Iranian opposition in order to change “the character of the Iranian leadership.” Doran and co-author James Glassman, another Bush administration official, argued for “moral and educational support for the Green Revolution opposition movements.”
Back in 2006, The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported on strong opposition within the U.S. military to an attack on Iran. Many in the military argued that with the U.S. still embroiled in Iraq, bombing Iran “would heighten the risks to American and coalition forces inside Iraq.” Hersh quoted retired Army Major General William Nash as saying that if the U.S. attacked Iran, the country’s “first possible response would be to send forces into Iraq. And, since the Iraqi Army has limited capacity, it means that the coalition forces would have to engage them.” But the advocates for regime change had an answer for the military.
“The Iran hawks in the White House and the State Department, including Elliott Abrams and Michael Doran, both of whom are National Security Council advisers on the Middle East, also have an answer for those who believe that the bombing of Iran would put American soldiers in Iraq at risk, the [Pentagon] consultant said,” according to Hersh. “He described the counterargument this way: ‘Yes, there will be Americans under attack, but they are under attack now.’”
Ahmari, an ardent neoconservative and an Iranian-American, is even more explicit about the overthrow of Iran’s government. As MJ Rosenberg pointed out for Al Jazeera English, Ahmari is sure that the overthrow of the Iranian regime would be a good thing. In the pages of Commentary magazine last March, Ahmari crows that “regime collapse in Iran represents a historic chance for advancing democratic development there and, by extension, the wider Middle East and North Africa.” Sounds familiar to the arguments of the Iraq-era neocons.
Their inclusion in FPRI’s program should come as no surprise, though. FPRI is “one of the oldest right-wing think tanks” and their “writers and in-house scholars routinely supported the Bush administration’s counterterrorism, Israel, missile defense, and anti-multilaterism policies,” Right Web notes.
Still, Ahmari’s and Doran’s involvement in educating high school teachers on Iran prompts this question: do American parents really want their high school teachers parroting what they learned from two advocates for more conflict with Iran? And what are these high schools doing going to learn from an explicitly right-wing think tank, particularly when there’s no strong voice against sanctions and war?
Update: Here’s a list of the schools who attended the FPRI program:
Schools Represented by State
California
Independence High School
Salesian High SchoolConnecticut
The Hopkins School
Taft SchoolFlorida
Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School
Suncoast Community High SchoolGeorgia
Henry County High SchoolIllinois
Deerfield High School
Morton High SchoolLouisiana
Ruston High SchoolMichigan
Richmond High SchoolMinnesota
Metcalf Junior High SchoolNorth Carolina
Hunter Huss High SchoolNebraska
Lincoln North Star High SchoolNew Jersey
Bloomfield Public Schools
Livingston High School
Trenton Central High SchoolNew Mexico
Santa Fe PrepNew York
Carmel High School
Emma Willard School
Marble Hill School for International Studies
Smithtown High School WestOhio
Laurel SchoolOregon
Bandon High SchoolPennsylvania
Athens Area School District
Central High School
Germantown Academy
Olney Charter High School
Schuylkill Valley High School
West Philadelphia Catholic HS
Westtown SchoolTennessee
Gibson County High SchoolTexas
Bellaire High School, Houston Independent School District
Flower Mound High School
Keystone SchoolUtah
Altamont High SchoolVirginia
Atlee High SchoolWisconsin
Beaver Dam High SchoolBRAZIL (!)
University of São Paulo
I wonder how many teachers know about the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader that installed the American-backed dictator we knew as “The Shah,” who brutalized and tortured political dissidents for 25 years, which thereby sparked the 1979 Islamic revolution? Here’s a good video: “History of Iran & USA in 10 minutes”: http://youtu.be/Q_AHJQiMxIw
why can’t you publish the list of schools, or link to a source that does list them? i’d like to know if any of the schools are from my home state, or my school district.
The Butcher History Institute?
They certainly are doing a good job at that.
It seems to me that why the ‘right'(sic) are succeeding so well is simply that they’re doing these sort of things. Meanwhile the ‘left’ (sic) are just tut tuting or complaining.
Remember the old adage “all you need for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing”…..
The mass population is operating in a information vacuum. the right wing wheel may be crooked but it’s the only one in town or at least visible.
The left need to mobilise and do the same thing but better and bigger, less politically dogmatic .
The key is not to go in there pumping left wing ideology the key should be the left need to be more credible to the natives …stop frightening them. with radical rhetoric. ‘softly softly catchee monkey’
A head on attack will simply make them more intransigent…curmudgeonly.
Oh wow, look at that. Another arm chair revolutionary advocating for the overthrow of Iran’s government from the safety of his high-rise office, hundreds of thousands of miles away.
It’s convenient to advocate for armed resistance against a sovereign nation’s government when you don’t have to be involved in armed resistance against a sovereign nation’s government. I don’t know about you but where I come from (which technically doesn’t exist per se, thanks to Uncle Sam and the big bad bibi monster), what these fools are calling for is “state-sponsored terrorism.”