ODU Professor Steve Yetiv Discusses Iraq War 20 Years Later with NPR

Old Dominion University political science professor Steve Yetiv, an expert on American foreign policy and international relations, appeared on National Public Radio (NPR) on Thursday, Feb. 24 to discuss the first Persian Gulf War. In a story entitled, "Twenty Years Later, First Iraq War Still Resonates," Yetiv discussed the war's legacy and how its reverberations are still felt today.

In an interview with NPR's Alan Greenblatt, Yetiv said, "It was one of history's most lopsided victories. On the military side, it turned out not to be the 'mother of all battles' at all."

"Bin Laden has repeatedly referred to the U.S. going into Saudi Arabia as a key reason for Sept. 11," he concluded.

Yetiv is the author of two new books. "Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decision-Making in the Gulf Wars," second edition, from Johns Hopkins University Press, dissects the U.S.-led wars in 1991 and 2003, with the help of newly released declassified documents emphasizing the how and why of these conflicts. The book is now available at Johns Hopkins University Press and in outlets such as Amazon.

His second work, "The Petroleum Triangle: Global Oil, Globalization and Transnational Terrorism" (Cornell University Press), scheduled for release this summer, explores how a relatively small group of terrorists has threatened global security. The central argument of the book is that Al Qaeda (including its many affiliates) has developed into a real and perceived threat to global security and has been hard to eliminate due to a combination of factors and issues that have emerged from the Middle East oil and modern globalization eras. In the work, Yetiv examines the extraordinary attention, money and power devoted to eliminating the Al Qaeda threat to national and global security.

Yetiv, a widely sought expert on the Middle East, has published articles in Security Studies, The British Journal of Political Science and The Middle East Journal. He is also the author of "Explaining Foreign Policy," "Crude Awakenings: Global Oil Security and American Foreign Policy" and "The Absence of Grand Strategy: The United States and the Persian Gulf." Yetiv has served as a consultant to the Department of State, Department of Defense, General Accounting Office and CNN International. He appears regularly in the media and has published more than 250 opinion and editorial pieces.

The full story can be found online at: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/133991181/twenty-years-later-first-iraq-war-still-resonates.