An American University for Iraq but Not in Baghdad

Who decides whether they want your Friking American University in Iraqi, dont you think there are to many dead Iraqis and Families of the dead to remember, what America did to their Nation.

By EDWARD WONG

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq — It would be an ambitious project even in a Middle Eastern country not embroiled in war: build an American-style university where classes are taught in English, teachers come from around the world and graduates compete for lucrative jobs in fields like business and computer science.

Yet some of the leading lights of Iraq’s political and intellectual classes are doing exactly that, even as the bloodshed widens.

Their planned American University of Iraq is modeled after the famous private universities in Cairo and Beirut. The project’s managers have a board of trustees; a business plan recently completed by McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm; three candidates for university president; and $25 million, much of it in pledges from the American government and Kurdish sources. To fulfill their dream, they need much more: $200 million to $250 million over 15 years, said Azzam Alwash, the board’s executive secretary.

But if it does become a reality, the university will not be built in Baghdad, which for centuries was a beacon of learning in the Arab world.

Instead, it is slated for what is the most non-Iraqi part of Iraq. The site is on a windswept hilltop along the outskirts of Sulaimaniya, the eastern capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, 150 miles north of Baghdad and far from the car bombs and death squads that are tearing apart the Arab regions of Iraq. Because of its relative safety so far, Kurdistan can more easily attract aid and reconstruction money.

With doctors, engineers, businesspeople, academics and students among the hundreds of thousands fleeing to neighboring countries or the West, the university raises hopes of stanching the country’s enormous brain drain and pushing Iraq forward. “You really need to develop the political elite of the future, the educated elite of the future,” said Barham Salih, the project’s Kurdish founder, a deputy prime minister who received a doctorate in statistics and computer modeling from Liverpool University in Britain, and whose daughter attends Princeton. “The focus is also to stimulate reform in the Iraqi education system.” >>>cont

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