A significant number of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are coming back hungry to learn more about a part of the world where they’ve just spent, in some cases, years. Some of them think they have a few things to teach their professors and fellow students. Will the trend enrich Middle East studies, or somehow deform it?
Marc Lynch, the director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University, recently set off a debate within his field with a blog post that touched on these questions. The veterans, Lynch observed, may be more interested in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf States than in the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, and this, he suggested, may shift the field’s center of gravity. (Foreign Policy magazine hosts Lynch’s blog; Inside Higher Education reported on the energetic reactions to it.) Some scholars, he noted, fear the new breed of student may push the field to the “right,” but he rejected that notion: “The officers I’ve met are all over the map politically and in terms of their intellectual aspirations. Indeed, I’d guess that the bias would be towards pragmatism and empiricism, and against any kind of ideological doctrines.”
Lynch said the veterans would be welcomed by virtually every scholar. But some of the commenters reacting to his post sounded more skeptical. It depends, one wrote, on whether the new students “are prostituting themselves to the Pentagon.”
Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com.
