Schmidt on Saddam

Gutowski in South Africa

Oaxaca's Zócalo

Woodman in Florence

NCCLA Call for Papers '03

NCCLA Research and Teaching Awards

Ames Piano Quartet to Cuba

mahansen@dmreg.com
MARC HANSEN
Register Columnist
01/28/2003

We're going to war. That seems more likely with every Hans Blix sighting.

And, one more time, why are we going?

If we don't, Saddam Hussein will unleash chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction on us. Either that or he'll hand them off to the terrorists and watch them do the dirty work.

That has to be the reason. If it isn't, this seems like the worst idea since the Bay of Pigs.

But there's a problem. The United Nations inspectors haven't found any of these chemical or biological weapons. The Iraqis haven't made it easy. They've turned the inspection process into the most dangerous scavenger hunt in world history.

So it seems we have a choice as citizens. To scream hell no, don't go or to place our trust in the president and his advisers.

I'm as patriotic as the next skeptic, but the latter alternative involves a major leap of faith. I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a little more proof.
That's why I sought out Dr. Politics, an Iowa State professor whose real name is Steffen Schmidt. Dr. Politics is the name he uses on his radio show every Tuesday morning on WOI.

One of the reasons I like talking to Dr. Politics is that he rarely says things like, "On the one hand," and "on the other."
Maybe he should, but he doesn't, which is refreshing. Republicans think he's a Democrat. Democrats think he's a Republican. He appears to be an independent thinker who speaks in declarative sentences without coming across like the true believers always screaming at one another on cable TV.

Sitting in his office in Ames, Ia., is Schmidt the last word on Saddam Hussein? He isn't the last word or the first but he does have a theory worth sharing with you.

Dr. Politics believes that not only do we know Iraq has biological and chemical weapons, but that we also know where they are. He says we don't inform the United Nations because we don't really want the inspectors to find them. If the inspectors find them, we get peaceful disarmament. The weapons go but Saddam stays and the real problem persists. If we storm in and find the weapons, we finish the job and the real problem disappears.

Why hasn't the U.N. found them?

"Finding these weapons in a big country is like finding a needle in a huge haystack."

Why aren't we more interested in North Korea?

"North Korea, for all its goofiness, actually is able to interact with people. The Russians, Chinese and Japanese have a lot of influence and are working on them."

George Bush hasn't made a good case for war, even Schmidt admits that. In his State of the Union Address tonight, I half expect him to say, "I'd tell you why we must invade Iraq, but then I'd have to kill you."

The president knows more than he's letting on, Dr. Politics insists. If he's just an oil-hungry, gun-slinging cowboy intent on exacting revenge for the plot to kill his daddy, more moderate souls like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice would refuse to fall in behind him.

"If my theory is correct," Schmidt says, "the United States must surely during all these years have been keeping a very close eye on Saddam Hussein."

If we were able to track the precise movement of cocaine in the jungles of Colombia, Schmidt says, surely we've done the same thing with Iraqi weapons.

"In the mid-"80s, they could see exactly where these drugs were every day of the week," he says. "They ended up in a Colombian rain forest. With the help of the Colombian government, we went in, busted the operation wide open and burned down the facilities. It was a wonderful success."

Imagine the advancements in surveillance technology almost 20 years later.

"If we're halfway smart, we've been helping Saddam smuggle stuff in and out and tracking it with homing devices. According to this theory, we already have special forces in Iraq ready to carry out a hard-hitting assault on the storage facilities. I just have to believe we're been tracking, tracing and tagging these weapons. If the CIA is doing anything right, its agents must have infiltrated the process."

It's as good as most theories and better than many. If nothing more, it warms the heart to hear an academic who believes the CIA and the FBI might actually have a clue.

I don't know if he's right, but if we're going in, I sure hope he is.
"If it doesn't turn out that way," he says with a shrug and a smile, "I still have tenure."

By Bill Woodman, Professor
Department of Sociology
 
I think that I can speak for most teachers of historical and contemporary social theory, having done so for well over two decades, that teaching theory is mostly a thankless task.  I was surprised, therefore, to hear from my colleague Carl Bleyle from Music, who directs the Semester in Florence Program, for he called to take me up on an almost casual offer, should the need arise, to teach a course on Renaissance social theory (Machiavelli in particular) in Florence. It turned out by the time the call came that my wife Toni, having recently retired from teaching foreign language at Ames High School, was free to travel as well.  I was to act as temporary program director while Carl and his wife Patricia returned to the states and I was to find out that just as Patricia’s work with the students is important to Carl, Toni’s assistance turned out to be invaluable to me as well.
 
The class consisted of seven ISU students from an assortment of majors as diverse as horticulture, biology, economics and psychology.  We read and discussed in intense detail three texts within the space of a month, with two-hour sessions four days/week.  The students first read the excellent Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker while I sketched an historical overview linking Roman Italy with early Renaissance Florence.  Operating as I do in many graduate seminars, we then carefully worked our way, line by line, through Machiavelli’s’ The Prince and then The Discourses.  It is always a joy to see a student discover that Machiavelli can still shock first time readers in The Prince and that he argues just as passionately for free republics in The Discourses.
   
One day after class we took a “field trip,” by leaving the British Institute which sits on the banks of the River Arno and walking around the block where we all had our pictures taken by a passing Florentine in front of a famous structure – the Machiavelli family apartments.  It was easy to keep in mind the machinations between the Machiavelli and Medici families when we looked out our seminar room, across the Arno at a view of Florence dominated by Filippo Brunelleschi’s Duomo dome and the famous tower of the Palazzo della Signoria.  Our apartment nearby, above St. Marks English Church (another building owned by the Machiavelli family at one time), was a mere block away from the Ponte Vecchio—it being next to impossible to ignore the art and history even if one wanted to do so.  The students lived all on one floor of an apartment building across Florence, perhaps a fifteen minute walk including stops at store windows, near Piazza San Marco, where the church frescoes and the Taliban monk Savonarola’s cell is a tourist attraction. In the afternoons the students were taking courses in art history and my favorite—we sat in when time permitted—Etruscan and Roman Archeology.  The course culminated in guided tours by University of Florence faculty of, among other things, the museums at Fiesole, a nearby Etruscan town, and the Archeological Museum of Florence, still a largely undiscovered gem.
 
Teaching in Florence was both great fun and demanding. I found the students hard working and engaged while being constantly impressed that they still managed to maximize the experience by zipping off to weekend destinations such Munich, Rome, Milan and the Italian Rivera.  We often heard locals repeat like a mantra the saying that “Seventy percent of the world’s art treasures are in Italy and half of those are in Florence.”  Whatever the truth, my theory is that one could never live long enough in Florence in order to run out of startling historical and artistic finds.  Finally, I would add that our experience was made all the more memorable and special by our getting to know these wonderful students.