Her Prof - 'Rice Hasn't Learned From History'

Rice's Professor: "A Terrible Failure of Education"

When the Bush administration exploited the nation's anxiety over 9/11 to justify invading Iraq, Gilbert said, "it was the worst foreign policy decision made in living memory.

The fact that Rice is capable of defending the decision to go to war is a "terrible failure of education, of [not] picking up what your education should have led you to."

Whether Rice shared the neoconservatives' obsession with Iraq or was just being a "good soldier," Gilbert said, Iraq will be her disastrous legacy.

"It was such a horrendous mistake, knowing what she should have known. Unstable countries are far more dangerous than dictators," he said.

"How could you have missed what happened in Iran in 1979? How could you not understand that if Iraq implodes like Iran did, you're not making peace, you're making war?"

Gilbert said that through its war with Iraq, the U.S. has achieved what was long considered impossible: We have managed to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis, who have hated each other for decades.

"They are united against a common enemy: us.

"This is idiocy."

And Gilbert, who is a Democrat, called John Kerry's pronouncements about internationalizing the war "eerie nothings."

He said it would be like asking other countries "to follow us into an erupting volcano. You'd have to be out of your mind to get involved in Iraq now."

But the Bush administration's insistence that we will turn the government over to the Iraqis on June 30 is no better, he said.

"Just exactly who are we going to turn the country over to?"

Far more likely is that we will be stuck in Iraq indefinitely, he said, drawn into a seething civil war. "I think getting out of Vietnam is going to seem easy when we compare it to getting out of Iraq."

Now, years after he lectured Condoleezza Rice on his favorite lesson about "King Lear" and the hubris of war, Gilbert is still in the classroom, incurably hooked on teaching.

He shakes his head. Rice should have known better than to send our troops to Iraq, he said.

"I can forgive 9/11. But don't ask me to forgive Iraq."