Not any more. According to the Democracy Now interview that John Bizwas posted here, Christian Parenti has, "with much reluctance," come to the position that "the U.S. does have to pull out as soon as possible because the U.S. cannot stabilize the situation. The U.S. is exacerbating the situation. Yes, the U.S. will leave Iraq as a complete disaster. As rubble, as a pile of corpses with probably some sort of civil war going on. But staying there exacerbates it and helps spread this further into the region" ("Is the U.S. Winning in Iraq? A Debate between The Nation's Christian Parenti and the American Enterprise Institute," <http://www.democracynow.org/static/zinsmeisterparenti.shtml>24 Sept. 2004</a>). In other words, he has finally come around to the position that his father has held all along without setting his foot in a war zone in Iraq. That in large part explains "much reluctance," I suspect. Who wants to be told "I told you so" by one's own father? :->
A small part of Christian Parenti's "reluctance" is probably rooted in his apparent belief that Washington could and should have reconstructed Iraq: "the U.S. Army faces a problem in Iraq that it cannot solve because reconstruction has broken down, and reconstruction has broken down because Bush-connected firms, Halliburton and Bechtel, have taken huge sums of money and done essentially nothing with it. And Iraqis are not getting jobs" ("Is the U.S. Winning in Iraq? A Debate between The Nation's Christian Parenti and the American Enterprise Institute," <http://www.democracynow.org/static/zinsmeisterparenti.shtml>24 Sept. 2004</a>). But why would Washington have done it otherwise? Why bother to invade a country only to give its natives -- rather than one's friends and benefactors -- jobs? Christian Parenti may have hung around with the crowd who make a living getting grants from philanthropists and running NGOs for too long for his own good. That crowd always try to convince you that out of ashes of any American war can a phoenix of the Marshall Plan and the Works Progress Administration rise. It's better to make a living like his father, a splendid Marxist businessman, who manages to extract $4,000 per speaking engagement out of activists who invite him. Line up twelve speaking engagements like that per year, and publish a book every two years (sales ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 copies), and you are free to say farewell to NGOs and philanthropists and burn as many bridges as you like. I'm sure that Christian Parenti is smart and charming enough to be able to live like that.
Failing that, it's better to take a regular college teaching job than pursue unreliable grants and fellowships -- professors can unionize in a good old proletarian fashion and, even without a union, can occasionally pass a vote of no confidence in the likes of Lawrence H. Summers (218-185, with 18 abstentions). The vote of no confidence, though non-binding, can still have a beneficial effect: "Lawrence H. Summers, the embattled president of Harvard University, announced . . . that the university would spend at least $50 million over the next decade to recruit, support and promote women and members of underrepresented minority groups on its faculty" (Alan Finder, "Harvard Will Spend $50 Million To Make Faculty More Diverse," <http://pathbox.wustl.edu/~awn/awntop/news/harvard51705.pdf?e>, 17 May 2005). $50 million is not a big sum for an institution with an operating budget of $2.5 billion and an endowment of $22.6 billion, but it's still more money for women and people of color than Summers, left to his own devices, would have coughed up. A motion that stated "the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers" was submitted by Dr. J. Lorand Matory, Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies: <http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~afroam/Faculty/J__Lorand_Matory/j__lorand_matory.html>. Professor Matory deserves a round of applause. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>