War Architects Enjoy Top Academic Gigs 22 Years After Illegal Invasion of Iraq

Today, on the 22nd anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, key architects and commanders of this monstrous war crime, from Condoleezza Rice to David Petraeus, sit comfortably in cushy positions at top American universities.

At the same time, the overseers of the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment and siege on Gaza, considered a genocide by human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are already settling into equally fancy appointments at elite schools. Just recently, Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Jake Sullivan accepted gigs at Harvard, with Sullivan’s professorship named after none other than former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Both Sullivan and McGurk were key officials who implemented Biden’s Gaza policies, and McGurk’s work stretches back to the Iraq occupation.

Many of these universities — Harvard to Yale, Columbia to Stanford — have made statements around injustices such as Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but have mostly stayed quiet around Israel’s destruction of Gaza and scholasticide against Palestinian universities. These administrations have also aggressively repressed students who protested ongoing atrocities against Palestinians and demanded that universities break ties with Israel’s U.S.-backed war machine that oversees occupation and apartheid. The university response to dissent around the U.S.-Israel war on Palestine has been far more iron-fisted than anything seen during the Iraq War.

“This is the Palestine exception,” Van Gosse, co-founder of Historians Against the War, which formed in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War, and current co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy, told Truthout.

Still, Gosse and others who mobilized academia to oppose the Iraq War are joining a new generation of student activists to push back against university complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.

Anniversary of a War Crime

Across the world, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is widely seen as a moral abomination, made possible by a campaign of deceit by the George W. Bush administration, which falsely claimed that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction as pretext for an illegal invasion.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights labelled the invasion a “crime” and said the U.S. “committed war crimes including massacres and torture on a massive scale.” Amnesty International emphasized the “gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law perpetrated by the United States-led Coalition” during the invasion and occupation, which formally ended in 2011.

Gosse, a professor emeritus at Franklin and Marshall College who taught classes on the laws of war, told Truthout that, “Anyone connected to the Iraq War is responsible for the first crime of war, which is aggression.”

“If you make war without a casus belli, it’s a war crime,” he said.

Key architects and overseers of the second U.S. war on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious teaching appointments and lucrative speaking gigs at U.S. universities.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 315,000 Iraqis, overwhelmingly civilians, may have died during the invasion and occupation, though this is likely an undercount. Around 9.2 million Iraqis — 37 percent of Iraq’s prewar population — may have been displaced. All this came after years of devastating sanctions, some of which were implemented as early as 1990, one year before the first U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. occupation oversaw torture and massacres of Iraqis and led to massive sectarian violence and a ravaging of the nation’s educational system and public health. The war and occupation upended the region politically, leading to hundreds of thousands of more deaths and millions more displacements.

Iraq War Architects Flood Universities

And yet, key architects and overseers of the second U.S. war on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious teaching appointments and lucrative speaking gigs at U.S. universities.

Condoleezza Rice, a war hawk who served as national security adviser during the 2003 invasion and later as secretary of state, has enjoyed a cozy relationship with universities since she left government.

Today, she serves as the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as the director of the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank at Stanford. Rice has also enjoyed distinguished speaking invitations at universities like Pepperdine, Purdue and the University of Minnesota, where she reportedly took $150,000 for the gig.

Few government officials were more aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy. In 2006, just after he left the Bush administration, Feith was handed, without a faculty vote, a teaching position at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

The move “set off a faculty kerfuffle,” noted The New York Times, “with 72 professors, administrators and graduate students signing a letter of protest,” with “some going as far as to accuse him of war crimes.”

David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion before becoming the top U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and later CIA chief, has also been warmly welcomed into academia over the past decade or so.

In 2013, Petraeus was appointed to a visiting position at City University of New York. Set to receive a whopping $150,000 to teach a three-hour weekly class, Petraeus later forwent the payment after it became a public scandal, with his appointment facing protests.

But this was just the beginning of Petraeus’s academic invitations. Around the same time, he joined the University of Southern California (USC) faculty as a Judge Widney Professor, a title “reserved for eminent individuals from the arts, sciences, professions, business and community and national leadership,” according to a USC statement. Petraeus held the position for six years; USC was hush about his salary.

Today, Petraeus continues to enjoy speaking engagements from Rice University to the University of Arizona to Princeton, and he remains a Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Yale also served as a home for Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2022, he held a senior fellow position at the Ivy League school.

Harvard Welcomes Iraq and Gaza War Accomplices

Petraeus has also been a mainstay at Harvard University, serving for six years as a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

As journalist Michael Massing noted, the Belfer Center is a “virtual arm of the military-intelligence complex,” with a slew of top leaders and fellows tied to the Pentagon and weapons companies.

Few government officials were more aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith. Feith was handed, without a faculty vote, a teaching position at Georgetown.

In 2023, Meghan L. O’Sullivan became the head of the Belfer Center. According to a 2006 profile in The New York Times, O’Sullivan was one of Bush’s top advisers on Iraq and Afghanistan, with colleagues saying she was “instrumental in shaping Mr. Bush’s views,” and “the most senior official working on those nations full time at the White House.” She also spent over a year in Baghdad as an aide to Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority, making him Iraq’s de facto ruler during the early years of the occupation. Bremer single handedly implemented widely reviled free-market reforms and privatization schemes while in charge.

In 2022, O’Sullivan, who was already a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, faced protests from antiwar activists for her position as a board director of weapons giant Raytheon — a lucrative position she held starting in 2017 and only stepped down from in early 2023 after being appointed as the Belfer Center director.

Harvard also just announced that former Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who helped oversee U.S. backing for Israel’s siege of Gaza, will be the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, affiliated with the Belfer Center.

Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023, is widely seen as a war criminal for his backing of atrocities in Southeast Asia, Latin America and East Timor throughout the 1970s. Kissinger himself was welcomed by universities until his death, though he often faced protests when speaking at campuses.

Gosse recalls protests against Kissinger’s commencement addresses in the 1980s. “There’s really no great record of institutions recognizing the criminality of the architects of these terrible wars,” he told Truthout.

Additionally, Harvard recently announced that Brett McGurk would join the Belfer Center as a senior fellow.

McGurk was Joe Biden’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa and one of the administration’s key advisers on Israel’s war on Gaza who was deeply involved with negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Reporting by HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed suggests that McGurk’s main concern was achieving Saudi-Israeli “normalization” at the expense of Palestinian human rights.

McGurk also served in the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, where he strongly influenced U.S. policy in Iraq. McGurk has been criticized for his close support of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One diplomat called McGurk “a consummate operator in Washington” but saw “no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people.”

Harrison Mann, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who resigned in May 2024 from the Defense Intelligence Agency in protest of U.S. policy in Gaza, lambasted Harvard’s hiring of McGurk, who he called “an enthusiastic and influential advocate for the U.S. military support that sustained Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza.”

“Hiring McGurk is a declaration that being party to a litany of war crimes isn’t a deal-breaker at Harvard,” wrote Mann.

Campus Ties to Militarism Are Nothing New

Close ties between U.S. universities and the war machine are nothing new. The military-industrial complex grew interdependently with the boom in higher education after World War II and into the Cold War.

Campus protests today against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this tradition of challenging university ties to the war machine.

From Stanford to MIT, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, defense dollars and corporate money poured into research labs. Key architects of the U.S. war on Vietnam and Southeast Asia like McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger held prestigious roles at Harvard before entering the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

In the late 1960s, however, mass student uprisings across campuses began to openly challenge the tight alliance between universities and the war industry during the U.S. war on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Militant protests against companies like Dow Chemical — maker of napalm — erupted at dozens of campuses. Student movements from Berkeley to Madison to Columbia engaged in building occupations and mapped out their schools’ ties to corporate power and the war machine.

Campus protests today against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this tradition of challenging university ties to the war machine.

Dozens of universities and their research labs, from Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon to MIT and the University of Southern California, receive billions in Pentagon funding. Students from Columbia to Cornell have protested against the close ties between weapons manufacturers who supply Israel’s annihilation campaign and their own university boards that welcome representatives of these weapons manufacturers as trustees and donors.

The Palestine Exception

In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. academics decided to resist. Dozens of professors came together at the January 2003 conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) to form a new group, Historians Against the War (HAW).

Gosse, who co-founded HAW, told Truthout that the group’s mission was “to organize historians to speak out and be active on campus and within the larger movement” against the war.

HAW members attended protests, held conferences and teach-ins, and wrote op-eds. At the 2007 AHA meeting they successfully passed a resolution calling for the end of the Iraq war.

Around 2014, Gosse says, HAW started focusing more on Palestine, forming a Palestine-Israel Working Group. The turn caused “a bit of controversy,” he said, and the groups’ efforts to “censure Israel’s manifold violations of academic freedom” at AHA meetings over the next few years were defeated.

After Trump’s first election, the group renamed itself Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD) and took up fights against right-wing “culture wars.” They still organize panels at AHA conferences that fill the room.

It was HPAD that introduced the resolution at the January 2025 AHA meeting opposing scholasticide in Gaza that prevailed with an overwhelming 428 to 88 vote, only to be vetoed by AHA leadership days later. In response, HPAD and the Palestine Historians Group drafted a letter signed by over 1,900 historians, including four former AHA presidents, that the AHA leadership council will discuss in a March 20 meeting. The letter calls for the AHA leadership council to rescind its veto of the Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.

For Gosse, who co-chairs HPAD, the contrasts between the wars on Iraq and Palestine are striking. Some university administrations supported debate over the Iraq War, he says. There was a sense that the Iraq War was “something really important that we should talk about,” says Gosse, which may be attributed to the “long playing out of the Vietnam syndrome” — a catchphrase that refers to popular skepticism toward U.S. military inventions in the decades following the Vietnam War.

But today, many of these same university administrations shun and repress discussion of injustice against Palestinians.

“You hit a wall if you challenge Israel,” says Gosse. “It’s been a third rail that has severely limited the ability of people to speak about the completely illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and the fact that Israel has been, for a very long time, an apartheid state.”

Gosse laments the “horrific capitulation and fear” among university administrations right now and the “complete destruction of faculty governance.” He called Columbia University’s actions around the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil “disgusting” and “utterly shameful.”

“They are debasing themselves,” he said. “They’ve taken all the progress made on academic freedom and free speech on campus and thrown it in the gutter within a few months.”

Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident who is Palestinian, is a recent graduate from Columbia University who participated in campus protests against the genocide in Gaza. He was arrested on March 8 by ICE and transferred to Louisiana, where the Trump administration is attempting to deport him for participating in pro-Palestine protests.

A federal judge temporarily halted the deportation order, and there has been an outpouring of support for Khalil and outrage at the administration’s brazen attacks on free speech rights. Khalil’s arrest follows many months of crackdowns on and criticisms against student protesters under the Biden administration, which the Trump administration has directly intensified.

As the U.S. enablers of catastrophic wars from Iraq to Gaza continue to find homes in the same universities that repress dissent around Palestine, attitudes beyond the heights of power are shifting. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the AHA scholasticide resolution, Gosse says, the push for it has been “a great success.”

“The most venerable learned society in the U.S. has been forced fully and completely to confront the scholasticide in Gaza,” he said.