Karam Publishes Journal Article on 1958 Iraqi Revolution
Jeffrey G. Karam, Lecturer in International Relations and Middle East Politics at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal article discussing how American officials were caught by surprise by a military coup and later revolution in Iraq in 1958.
Karam’s article, entitled “Missing Revolution: The American Intelligence Failure in Iraq, 1958,” was published in the journal Intelligence and National Security on January 8, 2016.
From the text of the article:
The causes of the Iraqi Revolution in 1958 have received attention in the literature; however, there is little scholarship on why the world was caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution on 14 July. Little is known on how American diplomats, intelligence officials, and Service Attachés assessed developments in Iraq before the revolution. In hindsight, American officials made poor sense of all internal developments before the July 14 revolution.6 Why were all intelligence estimates off the mark? I argue that the US intelligence failure is the product of two decisive factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence (HUMINT) in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments.
Read more here.
Jeffrey G. Karam is a Lecturer in International Relations and Middle East Politics at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brandeis University, a M.A. in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut, and a double B.A. in International Affairs and Public Administration from the Notre Dame University, Louaize. His research spans international relations, security studies, and comparative politics with an emphasis on American Foreign Policy and Intelligence in the Middle East. You can learn more about him here.