Modern History of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran

Catalog description

The countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran have been the central focus of American foreign policy in the past decade. This course will provide a geographic, social, cultural, political and economic survey of the modern history of all three countries. We will examine the trajectory each nation followed in becoming a modern state including the critical role of oil, political Islam, superpowers, and imperialism in shaping each of their histories in the 20th and 21st centuries. The class will focus especially on the watershed political events in each country since 1970’s, and especially 1979, the rise to power of Saddam Hussein, the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 up through the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.