Jonathan Carfagno wrote in his recent Your Turn guest column that he finds it “disgraceful” that we in the Rutgers University community — alumni, faculty and students — were motivated to object to the selection of Condoleezza Rice as this year’s guest speaker at commencement.
Ms. Rice had been invited by the Rutgers administration to receive an honorary degree and a $35,000 stipend for speaking to the graduates, but because of our “antics” — the circumstances which resulted in Ms. Rice’s decision not to speak — Mr. Carfagno concluded that “… students at Rutgers should be embarrassed.”
I disagree with Mr. Carfagno. As a Rutgers College Class of 1966 alum, I petitioned against Ms. Rice speaking. I am unapologetic and feel strongly that no member of the Rutgers community need feel embarrassed for any reason related to Ms. Rice’s decision.
Secretary of State Rice played a key role in an administration which lied to the American people and to the world about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The search for Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was presented by the Bush administration as the main goal of the invasion.
The speeches and references to the peril of the spread of nuclear and biological weapons were a constant drumbeat of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy for which Ms. Rice was a major author. At a time when we should have been devoting resources and manpower to the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, the Bush team with Ms. Rice advising targeted Iraq.
As an added inducement, Vice President Dick Chaney insisted that Iraqi oil would pay the expense of the invasion. None of the above was true. There were never WMDs in Saddam’s arsenal, and Iraqi oil would never be used to defray the trillion-dollar cost of the invasion and occupation.
And we now know that the key players in the administration knew what they were saying was not true. Ms. Rice was part of the team which fabricated layers of lies. The loss of life was in the millions, and the eventual cost of the war would exceed that of the Vietnam conflict which, until that time, had been the costliest in our history.
After the invasion was completed and the Iraqi army was disbanded, sectarian violence erupted. The Bush team with Ms. Rice advising had no answer for the waves of violence which gripped Iraq. With our forces and resources split between two fronts in Asia, our foreign policy was in shambles.
It was painfully obvious there was no plan to govern Iraq after defeating Saddam’s forces. In spite of these and other foreign policy disasters, Mr. Carfagno insists that Rutgers should have awarded Ms. Rice with an honorary degree and a hefty speaking fee. I could not disagree more. Mr. Carfagno wrote that in his opinion, the objections to Ms. Rice were based on “liberal/conservative” or as he wrote, on “R” and “D” designations.
I can only speak for my own decision. I called the Rutgers Alumni Association and voiced my objections which I am enumerating here. I wrote letters to Rutgers administrators citing the same objections. I have been a lifelong liberal Democrat, but politicians of either party who use lies to lead us into war must be remembered as such.
As an undergraduate at Rutgers in 1963 and 1964, I participated in “teach-ins” and other protests against the escalation of our involvement in Vietnam. I resented and objected to the lies which the Johnson Admin-istration promoted in the 1965 “lead-up” to the landing of Marines in DaNang and the onset of hostilities in South Vietnam.
After college I was drafted and eventually assigned to a station in the Mekong Delta and had the unfortunate opportunity to observe that war up close.
In 2003, during our invasion of Iraq, when Mr. Carfagno was in sixth grade, we all witnessed a repeat of an American president’s staff lying to the country about Hussein’s WMDs as a reason for a war. However, Mr. Carfagno has nothing but the highest respect for Ms. Rice, who was one of the authors of those lies.
So, I absolutely reject Mr. Carfagno’s praise for Ms. Rice and I absolutely reject his conclusions that we in the Rutgers community who lobbied against the invitation for Ms. Rice to speak should be ashamed for expressing our opinions.
Mr. Carfagno wrote that, “it is an embarrassment that faculty members and students protested the commencement speech of one of the country’s most dignified and accomplished diplomats.”
Again, I could not disagree more. Ms. Rice is clearly not the “most dignified nor the most accomplished diplomat.” It must be noted that Mr. Carfagno identified no peace treaty which Ms. Rice brokered, no new foreign policy initiative which she developed, nor any noteworthy book which she authored.
I could not be more proud that members of the Rutgers community exercised our FirstAmendment rights and lobbied against granting former Secretary of State Rice a Rutgers honorary degree and a stipend of $35,000. A university confers an honorary degree and awards a stipend for a guest speaker in order to identify a champion, a hero, a sage, a “mensch,” or someone with the next “new idea” for progress. Condoleezza Rice is none of these in my opinion.
John Calimano of Jackson is a Rutgers Class of 1966 alumnus, a U.S. Navy Vietnam veteran and a retired New Jersey public high school teacher.