Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Andrew Exum
Be sure to read the speech given on Monday by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Association of American Universities in Washington.
Since 9/11, the U.S. and its allies have been involved in two prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are low-tech conflicts in which anthropological skills and language [...]

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From Daniel Byman
While it is far too early to say that the United States and its allies have permanently “crippled” Al Qaeda in Iraq (as claimed by some U.S. officials), clearly the terrorist organization has suffered grievous blows in the last year. Indeed, U.S. officials are so pleased they hope to use the “Anbar model” [...]

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From MESH Admin
On Thursday evening, Turkish forces entered northern Iraq to do battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has called the move “a limited military incursion into a remote, isolated and uninhabited region.” According to various sources, there have been clashes in the Qandil mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian [...]

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From MESH Admin
Here is the latest (January 17) map of trends in ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad, from the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I). The green areas are predominantly Shiite, the blue are mostly or predominantly Sunni, and the brown areas are closely mixed. The yellow-orange-red inflammation indicates “incidents where deaths occurred from any means that were [...]

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From Harvey Sicherman
The Winograd Report has confirmed what I heard on a trip to Israel in August 2006, namely, that an inexperienced Israeli cabinet sought the rewards of a combined arms (air-ground) operation at the risk of an air raid. When this proved inadequate to the rhetoric of victory, the same group bungled the [...]

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From Andrew Exum
If there is but one article readers of this blog should take the time to read in the next few days, it is most certainly Matt Matthews’s interview with Israeli general Shimon Naveh on the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Since I wrote my study of Hezbollah’s performance during the 2006 war, [...]

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From Andrew Exum
A few weeks ago, I stood in front of a roomful of U.S. Marine Corps officers at Quantico and spoke at length about Hezbollah, the Shia militant group whose military successes against Israel have alternately inspired the Arab public and frightened the ruling Sunni regimes of the Arab world. The Marine Corps has [...]

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