Mark A. Drumbl and Jastine C. Barrett on the children associated with fighting forces around the world.

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Amid the chaos of the conquest of a large part of Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL, also know as ISIS, the Caliphate, or the Islamic State), there has been a great deal of attention paid to the political, military, social, humanitarian, and even religious implications. However, there has been little discussion of the economic impacts beyond a rise in the price of oil and drop in Iraqi oil exports. Professor Frank Gunter of Lehigh University, a retired Marine Colonel and economic advisor in Iraq, identifies the economic winners and losers created by the division of Iraq into sections controlled by the government in Baghdad, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), and the ISIL.

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The late peace researcher, William Eckhardt, made a particularly good point when he noted, ‘We can learn a lot about war through the study of civilization. We can learn a lot about civilization through the study of war’. The Cold War had just come to an end, and with it the future of civilization looked that little bit brighter; mutually assured destruction had been averted and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists saw fit to move the Doomsday Clock backwards from 10 minutes to midnight to 17 minutes to midnight.

By Operation_Crossroads_Baker_(wide).jpg: United States Department of Defense (either the U.S. Army or the U.S. Navy)derivative work: Victorrocha (Operation_Crossroads_Baker_(wide).jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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