Reuters, BAGHDAD
As US-British invasion forces gather, Muayad al-Wandawi, a modern history professor at Baghdad University, says Iraq has always been prey to Western ambitions.
Wandawi sees US and British policies through a historical prism that refracts long-standing colonial impulses to control Iraq's land, people and vast oil resources.
He recalls how Britain, then ruling Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, installed a monarchy in 1921, when a British warship brought Faisal, a Hashemite son of the Hejaz, in what is now Saudi Arabia, to become king of the new country.
Wandawi tells his political science students that the US now plans to install its own puppet ruler in Baghdad.
His colleague, Abdel-Kader Mohammad Fahmi, teaches political strategy, with an Iraqi perspective on US thinking.
"I am teaching my students the principles of the Pentagon policy -- that America's concept of security has become unethical, invisible and with no boundaries," he said.
"It is open to interpretation and is based on opportunism and interests. American policy is a policy of dictation and imposition. It interferes with our daily life," he added.
Smarting from the penury, humiliation and isolation inflicted by UN sanctions, Wandawi, like many Iraqis, blames the US and Britain for the 12-year-old embargo.
"I feel that I am being robbed under the cover of the United Nations. The American soldiers should stay with their families rather than allow themselves to be used in this dirty game by leaders who have personal political ambitions," he said.
Such views may seem unsurprising in a country where dissent is ferociously suppressed, but there is no mistaking the pain and anger felt by Wandawi at the way sanctions have narrowed his horizons and stunted Iraq's once-vaunted universities.
"The embargo is the most humiliating thing. I'm a university professor. I have a PhD. How can I be neutral towards America when every month I have to go and get my food rations to feed my kids?" he asked.
The government distributes food rations bought under the UN oil-for-food programme to most of Iraq's 23 million people.
"We've been eating lentils and beans for 12 years now. Life should not be like that," said Wandawi, who earned a degree in international relations at Britain's Reading University.
"The war is coming. All this scenario at the United Nations is cosmetic," he told Reuters at his office on campus.
The UN imposed trade sanctions on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. They cannot be removed before UN weapons inspectors declare Iraq free of chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile programs which it agreed to dismantle under the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire terms.
US President George W. Bush and his ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, say Iraq has had long enough to obey UN disarmament demands and may now have to be disarmed by force.
Iraqi academics, once comfortably off, have fallen into poverty under sanctions and seen their once sophisticated and pioneering education system disintegrate before their eyes.
Renowned across the Arab world, Iraqi intellectuals can no longer afford to buy books. Worse still, they have had to sell their own volumes to supplement their meagre incomes.
"The cheapest book in London now costs ?10 which means I cannot afford to buy it," said Wandawi, who has seen his monthly wage wither to US$150 from US$1,000 in 1990.
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