Adam Cote of Sanford, who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a member of the Maine Army National Guard, visits Bates College to offer a firsthand account of his time in Iraq at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall.

Sponsored by the Bates Democrats, the event is open to the public at no cost.

Now an attorney at the Portland law firm of Pierce Atwood LLP and considered a rising star in Maine Democratic politics, Cote served with the National Guard in Mosul. At Bates, he will discuss his experiences in Iraq and administration conduct of the war, and will urge listeners to support Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections.

“According to a recent survey from George Washington University, 86 percent of young voters said that a candidate’s position on Iraq will be on their minds when they vote,” says Bates Democrats President Jason Buxbaum, a junior from Hillsdale, N.J. “Adam Cote will remind us that the differences between Gov. John Baldacci and his Republican opponent on this issue couldn’t be clearer.”

Poet Brian Turner Brian Turner, author of the Beatrice Hawley Award-winning poetry collection Here Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005), will read from his work at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 30, in the Benjamin Mays Center, Russell Street, Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Turner earned an M.F.A. degree from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Previously, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division in 1999-2000.

Publishers Weekly describes Turner’s work as “straightforward and direct. It highlights the violence and death of the war in a manner little seen elsewhere.” New York Times Sunday Book Reviewer Joel Brouwer writes: “His poems about his tour of duty have a hurried quality, as if they had been drafted not back home in tranquil recollection but on the ground, in spare moments between patrols. As a result, his lines can have a terrific immediacy.”

Turner’s poetry has been published in journals, including Poetry Daily and the Georgia Review, and in the Voices in Wartime: The Anthology (White Press, 2005), released in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He lives in Fresno, Calif.

Turner’s Bates reading is cosponsored by the English department and Maine Chapter 001 of Veterans for Peace.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the discussion will start at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 20, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Campus Avenue.  The public is invited to attend free of charge

Leading the session will be Chris Beam, Trang Nguyen, Oliver Wolf and David Emery.

The current conflict in Iraq invites comparisons with the Vietnam War, says Beam.  “Numerous commentators on the Iraq war routinely refer to Vietnam to drive home their points, and the 2004 presidential candidates are engaged in a ‘battle of biographies’ over their respective military records during that divisive struggle,” Beam says.

A veteran of the Vietnam War and a native of Brunswick, Beam served in the Marine Corps from 1967 to 1970.  He is the Bates College archivist and a lecturer in history, who teaches a course on the Vietnam War.

Trang Nguyen is from Hanoi.  A Bates sophomore who plans to major in economics, she attended two years of high school in the United States and transferred to Bates from St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

Oliver Wolf, a Bates junior, is a political science major with a double concentration in U.S. political processes and international studies. He is president of the Bates College Republicans and vice chair of the Maine College Republicans, in which he helped build statewide membership to 19 chapters with more than 1,300 members since September 2003. Originally from Pittsburgh, Wolf is currently an active volunteer with the Maine Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign.

David Emery represented Maine’s First Congressional District from 1975 to 1983, service that included a stint on the House Armed Services Committee. In June 1983 President Reagan appointed him deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a position he held until June 1988.  He is president and owner of Scientific Marketing, a public opinion consulting firm, and resides in Tenants Harbor with his wife, Carol, and son, Albert.

Each commentator will offer his or her perspectives on both conflicts. The panel will then invite the audience to participate in a general discussion.

Participants are moderator James Richter, professor of political science, Bates College; Arlene MacLeod, associate professor of political science, Bates College; Dov Waxman, assistant professor of government, Bowdoin College; and Jon Custis, U.S. Marine Corps captain and a member of the Bates College Class of 1991, who will participate via speaker-phone. Panel members will offer remarks and then open the discussion to the audience. Planned topics will range from the war in Iraq to religious fundamentalism to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Proficient in Russian and German, Richter is the author of Khrushchev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and the essay “Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of National Identity,” included in the collection The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Westview, 1999). A member of the Bates faculty since 1987, he received the 1992 Bates Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The author of Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (Columbia University Press, 1991) and several articles on women and political change,  MacLeod teaches courses in political theory, area studies (Middle East and China) and women and politics. Her current research interests include the study of political imagination, politics and literature, and alternative ways of writing about politics, such as the personal essay and historical fiction.

Waxman teaches international relations and Middle Eastern politics. A former faculty member at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a visiting fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel, Waxman also has worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think-tank in Washington, D.C.  He is the author of three monographs, The Crisis of Identity in Post-Kemalist Turkey: Domestic Discord and Foreign Policy (1998), The Islamic Republic of Iran: Between Revolution and Realpolitik (1998) and Immigration and Identity: A New Security Perspective in Euro-Maghreb Relations (1997), all published by the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism. Widely published in scholarly journals, Waxman is writing a book, Defending/Defining the Nation: The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity.

Custis received his Bates degree in political science with a focus on international affairs. He joined the Marine Corps in 1992 and is a company commander of a Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion. He served in Somalia in 1994, and in Iraq and Kuwait from February through June 2004. He will return to Iraq in fall 2004.

Four members of the Bates College faculty will lead a forum exploring the U.S. war with Iraq and relations between the two countries at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Avenue.

The event is open to the public at no charge.

The United States and Iraq: A Forum for the Bates College Community will be hosted by Professor James Richter and assistant professors Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir and Matthew Nelson, all of the political science department, and Thomas Tracy, Phillips Professor of Religion.

Each of the four will speak briefly and then the discussion will be opened to comments and questions from the floor. Themes to be discussed include how the war on Iraq fits with “just war” theory, why intelligence failures are so common, how Iraq fits into the larger U.S. policy of preventive war and what steps lie ahead for the United States.

The forum is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty. For more information call 207-786-6195.

International politics came home to Bates Feb. 10 when the Representative Assembly, the college’s student governing body, adopted a resolution condemning preemptive military action in Iraq after a heated debate that lasted nearly 90 minutes.

“The RA demonstrated that it can and will be deliberative, representative and willing to act,” said RA President Christopher Laconi, a sophomore from Leawood, Kan. The resolution came as a result of an on-campus petition drive that received 959 signatures, representing nearly 57 percent of the student body. Approved by a vote of 45 to 9, the resolution is the first of its kind in Maine endorsed by any college student government on the issue of Iraq, says Laconi.

The text of the resolution reads: “We, the students of the Representative Assembly of Bates College, on behalf of the majority of the students at Bates College, regardless of whether or not Iraq has fully complied with U.N. resolution 1441, oppose

military action in Iraq; moreover, we urge President Bush to seek a policy of non-violent conflict resolution, to continue to allow the inspections to take place and to work within the framework of the United Nations. We also urge Senator Snowe, Senator Collins, Congressman Michaud, and Congressman Allen to lead the President toward a policy consistent with these guidelines. We affirm our support for the men and women in our armed services; however we urge our leadership to do everything within its power to see that these lives are not risked unnecessarily.”

A group of students, deciding to act on their political beliefs concerning the potential conflict in Iraq, organized the petition drive and spent four days collecting student signatures in Commons and at various social events.

“I find it very encouraging that the RA would break from its introspection and answer the call of the 959 members of the student body to take a firm and public stance on an issue such as this,” Laconi said. “In doing so only after a healthy and constructive debate, we sent a powerful message that at Bates we aren’t afraid to speak out.”

Earlier this week, the Maine House, following in the footsteps of the Maine Senate, passed a resolution urging President Bush to use diplomacy rather than war to resolve the Iraq crisis. Should the Senate approve the House version of the resolution, the Maine Legislature would be the first in the nation to ask the president to avoid war by pursuit of diplomatic means.

Panelists include Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe op-ed columnist; Seth Gitell, writer for the Boston Phoenix; activist and teacher Rosalie Tyler Paul, a board member at Peace Action Maine; and James Richter, associate professor of political science at Bates College.

Jacoby has been an op-ed columnist for the Globe since 1994. Seeking a conservative voice to balance its liberal roster of commentators, the Globe hired him away from its competitor the Boston Herald, where he had been chief editorial writer since 1987. The Boston Phoenix dubbed his twice-weekly essays “a must-read,” and the Globe began receiving more mail about his columns than those of all its other columnists combined. The first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a $10,000 award for opinion journalism, Jacoby has at different times been a political commentator for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate; the host of Talk of New England, a weekly television program; and a frequent guest on WCVB-TV’s public affairs program, Five on Five. He practiced law briefly at the firm of Baker & Hostetler in Cincinnati, Ohio, but returned to Boston to serve as deputy manager of Ray Shamie’s 1984 U.S. Senate campaign. In 1985-87, he was assistant to John Silber, president of Boston University. Jacoby graduated from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School.

A political writer for the Boston Phoenix, the nationally recognized weekly alternative newspaper, Gitell addresses state, national and international issues. He also pens a twice-weekly Internet column, “The Daily Jolt,” in which he often discusses the U.S. “war on terror.” Gitell appears frequently as a political analyst on New England Cable News. Prior to joining the Phoenix, Gitell was the Washington-based editor of The Forward, where he broke various national stories including Hilary Clinton’s hidden Jewish roots and her decision to change her prior position on Israel. He also covered the emergence of the democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal and The American Prospect. Author of Broken Promise: The Story of U.S. Army Special Forces and the Dega People in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, 1961-65 (Radix Press, 1996), Gitell received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.

Paul served as a board member of Peace Action Maine for 10 years, stepping down from her four-year position as board chair in 2002. A delegate at Peace Action’s national congress, she is a retired teacher who taught studio art at North Yarmouth Academy and Waynflete School.

Associate professor of political science at Bates, Richter regularly teaches courses on international relations and the politics of post-communism and environmental diplomacy, as well as seminars in theories of international politics and in nongovernmental organizations and world politics. His current research concerns the role of nongovernmental organizations and transnational activism in global governance, with particular attention to the impact of democratic assistance and transnational activism on the feminist and environmental movements in Russia.

Proficient in Russian and German, Richter is the author of Khruschev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and the essay “Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of National Identity”, included in the collection The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Westview, 1999). A member of the Bates faculty since 1987, he received the 1992 Bates Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Richter received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Panelists include Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe op-ed columnist; Seth Gitell, writer for the Boston Phoenix; activist and teacher Rosalie Tyler Paul, a board member at Peace Action Maine; and James Richter, associate professor of political science at Bates College.

Jacoby has been an op-ed columnist for the Globe since 1994. Seeking a conservative voice to balance its liberal roster of commentators, the Globe hired him away from its competitor the Boston Herald, where he had been chief editorial writer since 1987. The Boston Phoenix dubbed his twice-weekly essays “a must-read,” and the Globe began receiving more mail about his columns than those of all its other columnists combined.

The first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a $10,000 award for opinion journalism, Jacoby has at different times been a political commentator for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate; the host of Talk of New England, a weekly television program; and a frequent guest on WCVB-TV’s public affairs program, Five on Five. He practiced law briefly at the firm of Baker & Hostetler in Cincinnati, Ohio, but returned to Boston to serve as deputy manager of Ray Shamie’s 1984 U.S. Senate campaign. In 1985-87, he was assistant to John Silber, president of Boston University. Jacoby graduated from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School.

A political writer for the Boston Phoenix, the nationally recognized weekly alternative newspaper, Gitell addresses state, national and international issues. He also pens a twice-weekly Internet column, “The Daily Jolt,” in which he often discusses the U.S. “war on terror.” Gitell appears frequently as a political analyst on New England Cable News.

Prior to joining the Phoenix, Gitell was the Washington-based editor of The Forward, where he broke various national stories including Hilary Clinton’s hidden Jewish roots and her decision to change her prior position on Israel. He also covered the emergence of the democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal and The American Prospect. Author of Broken Promise: The Story of U.S. Army Special Forces and the Dega People in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, 1961-65 (Radix Press, 1996), Gitell received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.

Paul served as a board member of Peace Action Maine for 10 years, stepping down from her four-year position as board chair in 2002. A delegate at Peace Action’s national congress, she is a retired teacher who taught studio art at North Yarmouth Academy and Waynflete School.

Associate professor of political science at Bates, Richter regularly teaches courses on international relations and the politics of post-communism and environmental diplomacy, as well as seminars in theories of international politics and in nongovernmental organizations and world politics. His current research concerns the role of nongovernmental organizations and transnational activism in global governance, with particular attention to the impact of democratic assistance and transnational activism on the feminist and environmental movements in Russia.

Proficient in Russian and German, Richter is the author of Khruschev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and the essay Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of National Identity, included in the collection The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Westview, 1999). A member of the Bates faculty since 1987, he received the 1992 Bates Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Richter received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in the foreign policy studies program at the Brookings Institution, told an audience at Bates College on Sept. 19 that war with Iraq might be the only way to forestall Saddam Hussein’s employment of weapons of mass destruction. But O’Hanlon also said during a Great Falls Forum event that such a war would likely be bloodier than the 1991 Gulf War and could lead to a prolonged and costly U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“I don’t think Saddam is a monster,” O’Hanlon told an audience at Bates’ Edmund S. Muskie Archives, according to an article in the Lewiston Sun Journal.

“He’s contained in a box that pretty much hasn’t changed in size or shape for a decade,” O’Hanlon said. “He’s probably not going to become a worse threat in the future than he is already.” But, O’Hanlon continued, President Bush “has put his credibility and our national credibility on the line. And there is a serious argument for changing the status quo, so I do support the president’s effort to reintroduce weapons inspections into Iraq and, failing that, to use force.”

O’Hanlon, who spoke at Bates in October 2001 about U.S. national security following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been a senior fellow at Brookings since 1994, specializing in defense strategy and budget, military technology, use of military force, humanitarian intervention and security issues in Northeast Asia. His publications include Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration (2002) and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (with Ivo Daalder, 2000). He was a contributor to this year’s volume Protecting the American Homeland.

O’Hanlon has testified three times before Congress, appeared on the major U.S. television networks and written numerous opinion pieces for The New York Times and Washington Post.