Kenneth Pollack

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced or poorly sourced material about living persons must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful.
This article has been tagged since July 2007.

Kenneth Michael Pollack (born 1966) is a noted former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military analysis. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on related topics.

Kenneth Pollack was educated at Yale University, earning a B.A. in 1988. He went on to MIT, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1996. In government, Kenneth Pollack has served in a variety of roles. From 1988 until 1995, he was analyst on Iraqi and Iranian military issues for the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent a year as Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs with the United States National Security Council. In 1999, he rejoined the NSC as the Director for Persian Gulf Affairs. He also served two stints as a professor with the National Defense University.

Outside of government, he worked for the Brookings Institution as the director of research at its Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He previously worked for the Council of Foreign Relations as their director of national security studies. He has also written four books, the first two both being published in 2002. The first, Arabs at War, looks at the actions and lack of effectiveness of six Arab nations in the years between World War II and the Persian Gulf War. The second, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq details the history of United States actions against Iraq since the Persian Gulf War. He discusses the need to invade Iraq, and the possible ways of going about it. Pollack argued that Saddam Hussein was simply too volatile and aggressive in his policies to be trusted not to begin another conflict in a volatile region. Many have criticized his support for the Invasion of Iraq, including war reporter Robert Fisk.

In 2004, his third book, "The Persian Puzzle," was published. In contrast to his views on Iraq, in "The Persian Puzzle" he argued that though the threat of force is necessary in dealing with Iran, diplomacy rather than regime change by force is the best way of dealing with Iran because Iran's policy-makers are divided between pragmatists who are motivated by a desire to improve the economy and hardliners who fear U.S. attack and so seek a nuclear deterrent, - the United States can thus exploit this divide to negotiate a favourable agreement. He also argued that the hardliners leader, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was, unlike Saddam Hussein, rational and risk-averse and so, even if Iran did acquire a nuclear capability, Iran could be deterred in a way that Saddam Hussein could not be. He does not speak Persian and has never visited the country. He has written numerous articles for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs. He has also repeatedly testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He currently teaches Security Problems of the Middle East / Persian Gulf and Military Analysis at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service.

In 2007, Pollack co-authored the book "Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War" with Daniel L. Byman. This book analyzed 12 recent civil wars to derive six common ways in which fullscale ethnic civil wars "spillover" to affect neighboring states. Pollack and Byman argued that while spillover can range from modest effects to very severe problems (like causing other civil wars or triggering regional wars among neighboring states) that the early evidence so far suggested that the United States should be prepared for Iraq's potential descent into all-out civil war to be on the worse end of the spectrum. The book went on to lay out thirteen different ways that the United States and its allies might fashion a "containment" strategy for Iraq, which offered some chance of preventing all-out civil war in Iraq from destabilizing the wider Persian Gulf region in the event that American efforts to stabilize the country failed. While Pollack and Byman argued that such a containment strategy would be very difficult to make work given the historical problems of doing so and the specific problems created by previous American actions in Iraq, they also concluded that containment would likely prove America's least bad option because U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf were so important that Washington would have to try to mitigate the impact of spillover.

A U.S. government indictment alleges that Pollack provided information to former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman during the AIPAC espionage scandal.^[1]

Pollack is married to the well-known television journalist Andrea Koppel.

[edit] Books

Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8032-3733-2
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, Random House, 2002, ISBN 0-375-50928-3
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, Random House, 2004, ISBN 1-400-06315-9
"Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War", with Daniel L. Byman, Brookings Institution Press, 2007, ISBN 0-8157-1379-7