Middle East & North Africa

The Spring 2013 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This edition highlights the Belfer Center’s deepening engagement with China.

The Belfer Center's Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, Ashraf Hegazy, Joseph S. Nye, and Stephen Walt consider the U.S.'s shifting foreign policy in the Middle East.

Jennifer Dixon is a research fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program, analyzing how nations deal with controversial pasts.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From July 2004 to September 2007, she was special assistant to President George W. Bush and served as deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during part of that tenure. She spent more than two years in Iraq, most recently in fall 2008 at the request of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Raymond Odierno, to help conclude the security agreement and strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq.

International Security, America's leading journal of security affairs, provides sophisticated analyses of contemporary security issues and discusses their conceptual and historical foundations.

On Monday, April 10 in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, William Kristol, founding editor of the Weekly Standard and a former Kennedy School faculty member, squared off against John Deutch, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, MIT professor, and a member of the Belfer Center Board of Directors, in a lively and illuminating debate about Iraq: should we stay or withdraw? Belfer Center Director Graham Allison moderated the discussion.

A list of the latest scholarly titles produced by members of the Belfer Center.

As the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq have demonstrated, the burgeoning privatized security industry has transformed the combat landscape. With a presence of some 20,000 contractors working for an estimated 60 Private Security Firms (PSFs), the industry has taken on increasingly core military functions in Iraq-selling not just security services, but strategic planning, combat training, interrogation, and operational support. And due to the industry's unique lack of accountability- to the legal system, Congress, the public, and even the Pentagon-it has attracted considerable controversy in the process. What few people realize, however, is that the PSF industry's biggest liability may turn out to be what is claimed to be its primary advantage: cost.

Richard Clarke, former top terrorism advisor to President Bush and current Belfer Center Faculty Affiliate and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, told a JFK Jr. Forum audience on April 21 that the invasion of Iraq had played into al Qaeda's hands. It fulfilled bin Laden's prediction-that the US would invade and occupy an oil-producing Arabic country-and is using resources that should go toward the fight against terrorism. Iraq posed no threat to the US, Clarke told the overflow crowd.