News Topic

Members Making News

Thematic

Current Events in Historical Context, Military, Political

Geographic

Middle East, United States

Jane Dailey, professor of history at the University of Chicago and AHA member, wrote a Huffington Post op-ed about the history of American military involvement in the Middle East. In response to increased tensions with Iran, the Trump administration is quietly contemplating the possibility of preemptive military intervention, an idea that Dailey argues has been proven to be a mistake. Her piece advises Americans to learn from the Bush administration’s mistakes in Iraq, which she characterizes as a “catastrophically flawed” engagement initiated by a preemptive US assault following 9/11. As Dailey writes, “these claims of existential threat and alliance between a Middle Eastern sovereign state and Al Qaeda are familiar. Before we turn our sights on Iran, we owe it to our children and to the veterans we celebrate every day to recall what happened the last time the United States went down this path.”