International Security & Defense

8 Items

January 25, 2012 – President Barack Obama speaking at Intel's Fab 42, an art chip manufacturing plant in Chandler, AZ.

Nick Knupffer/Intel/Flickr

Analysis & Opinions - Politico

In Iraq, Obama Has Two Terrible Choices

| June 22, 2014

In his efforts to save Iraq, President Obama is right to demand more power-sharing and other political reforms from Iraqi leaders before the United States offers more military assistance. But Obama should not think he can hold off offering such assistance until he secures those reforms—not if he wants to prevent the bloody breakup of the country and a wider regional war. As sensible as a conditional approach seems, the president simply doesn’t have that option open to him.

March 10, 2003 - Bush and his top aides engaged in last-minute telephone diplomacy to world leaders in an uphill struggle to gain support for a U.N. resolution setting up war against Iraq.

AP Images

Journal Article - American Interest

The Iraq War at Ten

| March 19, 2013

April marks the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the United States and its partners. At this juncture, it is reasonable for Americans—and Iraqis and others—to ask whether the past decade of U.S. involvement in Iraq was worth it. Did the large human and financial costs produce an outcome that justifies the sacrifice?

President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, where he declared an end to the Iraq war, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end.

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

The Problem With Obama's Decision to Leave Iraq

| October 28, 2011

In April 2008, Ryan Crocker, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Congress, "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came." Given President Barack Obama's announcement last Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year, it is more important than ever to answer Crocker's implicit question about what, exactly, Washington will be leaving in its wake.

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Iraqi Politics And Implications For Oil And Energy

| July 2011

Iraq could be poised for a dramatic transformation in which it finally escapes the political and technical constraints that have kept it producing less than 4 percent of the world’s oil, writes Meghan L. O'Sullivan. Should Iraq meet its ambitions to bring nearly 10 million more barrels of oil on line by 2017, it would constitute the largest ever capacity increase in the history of the oil industry. Even half this much would represent a massive achievement.