I'll never forget the course I took at The University of Texas right after 9/11. I just happened to be signed up for a class on US/Middle East foreign policy to fulfill a social studies requirement for my degree. Our class was packed with tons of students auditing it, all trying to make some sense out of our "new world" and the "war on terror."
Our professor lived in the ME for a million years, and was the president of a university in Beirut during the 80s. He had been around the block.
He was very pragmatic and clear in this teaching. He told us one thing in particular that has always stuck with me. I'll paraphrase below. He said this in the early Spring of 2002:
"Now, you all need to pay attention. I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen over the next year. Watch and see. You'll start to see reports in the news media that Saddam and Bin Ladin planned this together, that they were co-conspirators, and that Saddam is planning even bigger attacks on the US. None of this is true. Saddam and Bin Ladin abhor one another. If you put them in a room together, they'd try and kill each other the moment they had the chance. Get ready for stories to be created as a reason to send us to war with Iraq."
Of course, everything played out exactly as our professor predicted.
