A Lot of Experience, a Little History

It's the second-to-last fall semester of the Bush administration, and, as the White House continues to push historical analogies for the Iraq war, providing versions of history lessons in presidential addresses, some who have already cycled through the Bush administration are out teaching actual history lessons.

Peter D. Feaver, Duke University

After two years as a strategic adviser to the National Security Council, where he drafted a 35-page public plan for victory in Iraq, Feaver has returned to Duke's political science department. According to his syllabus, his fall course on international relations "aims to help students make sense of the confusing daily stream of headlines coming from around the world by providing the background and conceptual tools students need to understand contemporary international relations."

Background comes by way of a heavy reading list including Robert Kagan's "Power and Weakness," Hans J. Morgenthau's "Six Principles of Political Realism" and Stephen Walt's "Taming American Power."

In the spring, Feaver says, he plans "to teach a new course that will directly reflect my last two years: a seminar on 'American Grand Strategy.' My current plan is to have students write a new U.S. National Security Strategy."

Philip D. Zelikow, University of Virginia

After resigning in December as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Zelikow has returned to Charlottesville. One reason he gave when he left the State Department was the need to tend to "some truly riveting obligations to college bursars" for his children's education.

But he's not counting too much on royalties for those tuition checks. In his two history courses, Zelikow appears to assign only one of his own books, "The Kennedy Tapes," co-written with Ernest May. Other texts include Akira Iriye's "The Origins of the Second World War," Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" and H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty."

Douglas Feith, Georgetown University

The former undersecretary of defense is teaching a seminar on the national security policy of the Bush administration.

Authors on his reading list include Hew Strachan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eugene V. Rostow, Melvin Laird, Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama (among many others -- the list seems to contain about 100-plus pages for every hour of class). Of his former colleagues, Feith includes Rice's 2000 Foreign Affairs article, several speeches of President Bush -- including his Sept. 20, 2001, address -- and a speech Feith delivered on civil liberties.

He also plans to assign Osama bin Laden's jihad statement from February 1998 and the national military strategic plan for war on terrorism.