Last October 7 was the eighteenth anniversary of the beginning of the American War in Afghanistan. The fact that this date passed without much notice shows that we have become so accustomed to being at war in this area that it hardly rates a mention in the news.
This course is about how we found ourselves enmeshed in a conflict for which there seems no end in sight. We will see that America has been involved in a contentious relationship with this region essentially from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. We will look at factors in our history and the history of the Greater Middle East to make it all but inevitable we would find ourselves in this situation.
The war began, not in September and October of 2001, but in 1980 and has continued uninterrupted since then. How and why 1980 is the appropriate starting date is something we will explore over the ten weeks of the course.
