Ofira seliktar biography of albert

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Ofira Seliktar is a professor of political science at Gratz College and adjunct professor at Temple University, specializing in predictive failures in intelligence.

Her new book is The Politics of Intelligence and American Wars with Iraq.

From Ofira Seliktar

The genesis of my book The Politics of Intelligence and American Wars with Iraq is rooted in my experience teaching a class on the Middle East at Texas A&M University during the revolution in Iran in 1979.

Most of my students were ROTC cadets who hoped to serve in intelligence, yet had difficulty understanding how a country could opt for what they defined as a regressive revolution. After having researched a book on the Carter administration’s failure to predict the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, I realized that such problems transcended my clas