Dear Dean Rothschild,

I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet and speak with you last week here in Washngton. However, the apprehensions I mentioned to you about the event that brought us together were very much validated (from my perspective obviously) when the evening’s program took place.

At a time in history when more than a million people have been killed and one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East practically destroyed -- this on top of what has happened in recent years to Lebanon, the Sudan, Algeria, Iran, and the Palestinians -- to have three like-minded Princeton professors simply repeating politically-correct ideas in a rather incentuous manner seemed to me intellectually undignified. It’s one thing for the politicians to act this way, as deplorable as that it itself has become. But for educators and intellectuals to act in this way is truly depressing, though not quite up to a P.R.I. (painful rectal itch).*

Seriously, everyone from Amnesty International to the Vatican has deplored what has been done to Iraq, a former White House Press Secretary has called the Gulf War itself a “plot”, a former Attorney General of the U.S. has called American policies “war crimes”, the U.N. has issued a report that over a half-million children have been killed because of the sanctions, and the resultant “peace process” has been roundly condemned as duplicitous and fraudulent by major personalities in this country and abroad. And yet we who studied international affairs at Princeton are offered not one word of any of these perspectives but instead are subjected to a cacophony of platitudes and misleading (certainly extremely incomplete) analysis. Furthermore, such events do not seem to me at all consistent with your recent comment about the WWS being a “dynamic forward-looking institution” - not when it comes to matters relating to the Middle East anyway.

Sincerely,

Mark A. Bruzonsky

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* Note for readers: The main refrain, and joke, of the evening was the repeated expression that Saddam Hussein was only now a P.R.I. (painful rectal itch) because the war had at least greatly weakened him militarily and financially.