Mylroie has been politically active in attempting to change American foreign policy toward the Middle East, according to Pipes. The primary focuses of this activism have been to convince people that Iran is a real threat and that "there is a possibility of a U.S.-Iraqi rapprochement," he says. "She's getting people together and getting issues on the table. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen."

"I'm very interested in the things she's doing and hope she continues it, particularly the work on Iraq...She's on the cutting edge of some interesting material," says Phebe A. Marr, a senior fellow at the U.S. Military National Defense University.

The assistant editor of Middle East Insight magazine, Raymond Stock, also praises Mylroie's political arguments. "She's argued forcefully and persuasively that the U.S. should back Iraq in the war and abandon its supposedly neutral position," he says. The originality of her scholarship lies in the professor's "unabashedely pro-Iraqi stance."

Travels and Travails

To accomplish this broad-ranging research on Middle East issues and policies, Mylroie has had to travel extensively. She has visited the region five times over the last decade, and her itinerary includes the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Sudan, and Cyprus. Last summer, she ventured to Iraq and Egypt to do research for an article examining the Egyptian position on the Iran-Iraq war.

In the course of her research, Mylroie interviewed all types of policymakers including ministers, advisers, and members of the Royal Court of Jordan to learn how they perceive their own interests in Middle Eastern crises. Egyptian leaders, for example, feared this past summer that their political ally Kuwait would be drawn into the Iran-Iraq war. Mylroie also spoke with many friends she had met at Harvard or on previous visits to the Middle East about what the people think of the latest foreign policy developments. "I catch up with them as to what the gossip of the country is and what the talk is," Mylroie says.

While interviewing government contacts in nations known for their hostility toward American interests is never a simple matter, Mylroie reports that Iraqi officials gave her easy access to government sources since her prior research had come out in support of Iraq. "I know their friendship was due to my friendship," Mylroie says. "If my position changed, there would be no more visas to Iraq." This is a common policy folled by many "illiberal regimes" all over the world, according to Mylroie.

Conversely, she has not interviewed any Iranian officials. "I wouldn't go [to Iran] because unless you have a pro-Iranian position, your life is in danger... I would be reluctant to go to a place where I felt the government could turn on me for political reasons."

Travel through foreign lands was not entirely devoted to research on government affairs, though. Mylroie has culled a diverse collection of souvenirs from her adventures over the past few years. Hanging from one of her living room walls is a complete microfiche copy of the Koran, the sacred text of the Islamic religion, and Mylroie also owns several pieces of Middle Eastern furniture. "That's one of the payoffs--you get to pick up theses things other people can only get at expensive import shops," she says.

Coincidences and Paradoxes

Mylroie first became interested in studying Middle Eastern politics almost by coincidence. She grew up in a small town outside Chicago and received her B.A. in political theory from Cornell. She soon shied away from the field because "to do political theory you have to be brilliant to say something new in a discussion that's centuries, if not millenia old," says Mylroie. "I wanted to study the real world."

Such an opportunity arrived when one of her Cornell professors travelled to Jerusalem to teach at Hebrew University. He needed someone to accompany him and care for his children, and so Mylroie took off a year from school to fill the position. She immediately fell in love with the city, she says. After six months Mylroie moved on to study in Munich, but she "missed Jerusalem--its...warmth and immediacy."

She then resolved to research Middle Eastern politics and spent the next two years in Cairo learning Arabic. Cairo was "always full of adventure--riding horses on the desert by the pyramids. You can't do that in Cambridge." Mylroie says she "slowly drifted East--to Cornell, then to Harvard, then to Egypt.

While in Egypt, she noted its transformation from a leader in the anti-Israeli coalition to a friend of Israel, after the Camp David accords. "I saw...that the Israelis were genuinely welcomed in Cairo. The Egyptians were kind of curious about them." She was also intrigued by the fact that the U.S. and Israel had not recognized the magnitude of the Egyptian policy shift.

Mylroie returned to Harvard to complete her Ph.D. and wrote a dissertation on the problems of security in the Persian Gulf after Britain's 1968 withdrawal from the region. She was next appointed an assistant professor of government and worked on transforming her doctoral dissertation into a book due out this spring.

Mylroie, who says she has enjoyed teaching undergraduates, is offering two courses this semester: "The U.S. and the Arab-Israeli Conflict" and "Topics in Arab/Persian Gulf Politics: The Gulf Since the Iranian Revolution." Next year, Mylroie plans to be on sabbatical to research American policies toward the Arab-Israeli crisis. She said she hopes this work, which is based on several themes discussed in her course on America's role in the Middle East, will form the basis of her second book.