GI Bill Leading to Better Middle East Policy

A lot of veterans will be going to school now, an opportunity they earned years ago.

This might have an unanticipated benefit; see Shift in Middle East Studies?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be about to change Middle Eastern studies — and not just by adding plenty of new subject material.

The incoming director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University last week published a post at his Foreign Policy blog that has set off a discussion about the next generation of Middle Eastern studies students and, eventually, professors.

Marc Lynch writes (and some others agree) that master’s programs and doctoral programs are starting to see an influx — one he expects to grow — of veterans, many of them military officers as well as those who worked for non-governmental organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The duration of the war, he writes, has led to an unusually large cohort of future thinkers about the Middle East shaped by their experiences there.

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