Why Didn't I Teach About the Iraq War?

This award-winning book focuses brilliantly on the daily experiences of Iraqis and US soldiers, but avoids the high-level policy debates

I've been thinking a lot about the Iraq war, and the fact that I hardly taught about it when I was an academic.

What happened that I all but avoided the most important war in US history since Vietnam? A bit of background

I began full-time, tenure-track teaching as a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University in 1999. Two years later, I became the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Human Rights at McGill University, again in the sociology department. Given that the Iraq War began in 2003, you would think I had started teaching about it as soon as it began.

After all, I designed and taught large, relevant McGill undergraduate classes, such as "The Sociology of War Crimes" and "Sociology of State Violence." In 2006, I moved to the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, in Ottawa. This was, and probably still is, Canada's premier graduate training ground for international affairs. For many graduate students, it is a highly selective stepping stone to Canada's diplomatic corps. While there, I taught related classes such as "Human Security," among others. I stayed in Canada until 2011, when I moved to Mexico for a year's sabbatical at CIDE (the Center for Economic Research and Teaching), a leading public university and think tank. In 2012, I took up a post at the University of Minnesota, where I held an endowed chair. In all that time, I hardly taught about the Iraq War.

The US-led invasion began in 2003 and quickly turned into a full-blown disaster. The US military "surge" under General Petraeus began in 2007 and conditions, arguably, got a bit better. A bit later, ISIS emerged from the wreckage of the overall American-led effort.

And yet, throughout all those years, I assigned only two readings on the Iraq War. The first, a 2007 International Security article by Colin Kahl, claimed that US forces had been more respectful of international law than they were given credit for at the outset of the invasion. I used that article to discuss the importance of international norms, even under battlefield conditions. The second, published by Burnham et al in the Lancet, documented the invasion and its aftermath's incredibly high civilian toll, chiefly because of the ensuing civil war and breakdown in law and order. I used that article to exemplify conflict-related research methods, with special emphasis on using household surveys to estimate war-related mortality. That was it. No lectures on the origins of the war, the way in which it unfolded, US and allied strategy, the breakdown of law and order, Iranian goals and cross-border actions, the bloody Shi'ite-Sunni civil war, the internal fights within those two communities (eg, Al Qaeda versus the "Sunni Awakening), and so much more. Later, when ISIS arose as a terrible force to be reckoned with across Iraq and Syria, I never taught about that either. Where Was I?

This was the most important US ground war since Vietnam, with huge costs to American soldiers, the US economy, and, more importantly, to the Iraqi people. All of these horrendous costs have been meticulously documented in the Brown University Costs of War Project, a truly remarkable research effort. I held a postdoc at Brown from 1998 to 1999, and know of some of the people involved. Why didn't I ever assign readings from that group? My Belated Reading I started asking myself these questions a few weeks ago, when I read three books on the Iraq War. Books that I should have read 15 years ago.

I began with Dexter Filkins' 2009 account of his wartime reporting, The Forever War, and continued with volumes by Thomas E. Ricks: his searing 2006 critique of the US invasion, Fiasco, and his more optimistic 2010 take, The Gamble.

Those are but three books in a vast library of journalistic, military and academic writing that I should have been intimately familiar with years ago. Filkins offers a series of gripping, micro vignettes, and his work is notable for its reporting both inside and outside the US military bubble. He interviewed hundreds of ordinary people - Iraqis and US soldiers alike - and avoids, for the most part, getting bogged down in elite-level chatter. Ricks, by contrast, was embedded within that bubble and focused on the ideas and infighting within, and between, US military and political factions, with an occasional (but superficial) aside about Iraqi politics and dynamics. All three books made me ask, "Where were you when all this was happening? Why were you not reading, teaching, researching, and writing about this most important of wars?"

I was focused on so many other things during those years, including the earlier war in the former Yugoslavia (which I'd studied for my dissertation), Turkey (which I'd studied for Human Rights Watch), Israel-Palestine (ditto), the Vietnam War, and many other conflicts. I even taught conflict-related research methods and published an article on using those in human rights work. Publishing Throughout this time, I was publishing in "leading" academic journals that should have been preoccupied with the Iraq war - International Security, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Human Rights Quarterly, and more (see my Google Scholar for details). I read those journals, but was not struck by the quantity of Iraq-focused material. I haven't counted, but I am guessing that a census of their published work from 2020-2025 would not reveal a respectable Iraq emphasis.

Personally, my attention to Iraq was ... non-existent. Not in my teaching (save for those two measly articles), and nothing in my research. I wrote a few op eds about Iraq, but those were not based on serious research. It was just me momentarily crashing the debate without doing my homework.

Faculty Meetings Surprisingly, Iraq rarely if ever came up, that I remember, in faculty meetings. I had colleagues who studied security, human rights, violence, and international relations more broadly. We hardly discussed the Iraq war in our meetings, even when the war was at its height. No one ever asked me whether I was teaching about Iraq in my classes, and no one, including senior colleagues, ever said, "I hope your courses cover the Iraq War. It's such a central theme of our time, our students need to be exposed." Students And finally, my students never asked me about the Iraq war either. No one ever said, "Hey, can we have a few classes and readings on the biggest war in US history? On the war that killed some 500,000 Iraqis, and beggared the US economy?" My students did not serve in the military, for the most part, and I don't think I had many who had fought in Iraq. If I did have Iraq veterans, they never spoke about it in class, perhaps because they sensed I wasn't sympathetic, or perhaps because they feared criticism from their fellow students. The academia I taught in at the time was quite liberal in its political orientation, and military material, no matter how important, was not popular. There was no demand for teaching about Iraq, either from students or my colleagues, and I offered no supply. No demand, no supply, no market for Iraq teaching in my tiny corner of liberal, international relations-oriented academia. Possible Explanations Why was there such a gaping hole? I'm sure it had something to do with my own interests, biases and failings, but there were also larger forces at play. I was opposed to the war from the beginning, as were most of my colleagues in sociology, political science, and international relations. We thought the war had been promoted under false pretences, and were angered by the way it unfolded. That discomfort, I think, made me, and perhaps others, recoil from teaching much about it. That was especially true when I taught in Canada, where disdain for US wartime motivations was strong from the outset. More importantly, I think, the real debates were going on within the US and its allied militaries. Rick's books are full of fascinating, high-level debates waged in meetings and on the pages of security-oriented journals, many of which relied on the kind of quantitative data that my colleagues and I would normally be drawn to. Most of those strategy-and-tactics journals were published by the US, British or allied militaries, however (eg, Parameters), and those were the kinds of publications academics like me rarely read.

I, and perhaps others, looked down on them as the kind of third-tier publications used by warriors and policy hacks, not "real" scholars like us. In the research-intensive academic institutions I worked in, publishing an article in Parameters would not help your tenure file. And since I tended to read articles in journals where I wanted to publish, I missed the entire debate. Personal comfort was also an issue. The kinds of academics I rubbed shoulders with didn't talk much to the US, British or allied militaries (with some notable exceptions), and if I'm honest, I and perhaps some others tacitly disdained those who did. Although I never said it outright, I thought they had drunk too deeply from the guns-and-bombs Kool Aid. I was arrogant and dismissive, and so, perhaps, were others. Finally, very few of us could physically visit Iraq, given the dangers, and could only do so if embedded with the US, British, or other allied militaries. A few intrepid academics may have made their way around Iraq outside the military bubble, but I don't know of them. Filkins is a top-notch journalist, not an academic, and he required a team of fixers, drivers, translators, and support personnel to do his reporting outside the wire. He was also willing to risk his life, which doesn't tend to be an academic characteristic. I think that I, and perhaps some of those around me, were derelict. We had a duty to study and teach that war, and we failed. Or rather, I failed. I spent 21 years in tenure-track and tenured academia, and only now, after my early retirement, have I taken the time to really read about the Iraq War. And only now do I realize how much I missed, how little I knew, and how important the debates were. And, more importantly, how little I taught my students. There was so much I should have known about. The debate within the US, British and other militaries about how to fight insurgencies, the importance of bringing a human security perspective to counterinsurgency, the regional geopolitical dynamics, the horrific civilian toll, the economic and health burdens, and so much more. I was opposed to the war from the outset, but that didn't excuse me from studying and teaching about the ways in which American, British, and other allied militaries were thinking about their role, tactics, and strategy. Iraq and Right-Wing Populism Here is another problem. For political scientists focused on American politics - which is not me - the Iraq war's blowback was crucial, I believe, and insufficiently discussed. I don't have the data, but I've read pieces suggesting the American public's disgust with the justification and/or the conduct of the Iraq War - how and why it was waged, and how much it cost the US from a human and economic perspective - were important factors in the rise of American right-wing populism and, ultimately, in Trump's electoral victories. If it were only me who botched all this, that would be one thing - I was just bad at my job. But I think it was, and perhaps still is, a bit of a systemic problem. International relations academics in top (liberal) research institutions are often uncomfortable with war-related policy debates over tactics and strategy. They are also wary of the data produced by active-duty or retired military personnel and institutions. We are uncomfortable talking to military people, listening to them, or taking their views seriously.

For many academics from my milieu, the military stuff is unpleasant, something to avoid. We don't want to be too close - physically, intellectually and above all, emotionally - to the men and women with guns. To those whose job it is to destroy, would and kill when ordered.

Even though, in my case, I was a soldier long ago. ----- James Ron is a former social scientist, consultant, and author. Please check out his LinkedIn or ResearchGate accounts, or his research blog.