Rational Minds of the Persian Gulf War (1990)
University of Illinois, Springfield. M.A. in History
Most histories of the Persian Gulf War explain what happened. This thesis tests whether the decisions were rational. Applying game theory, mathematical structures, and formal logic to the choices made by Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration, and coalition leadership, it builds an objective framework for testing rationality in wartime decision-making, one that strips away the subjectivity and hindsight bias that conventional military history struggles to escape. The work bridges behavioral economics and history, and it is the intellectual foundation for how I still evaluate high-stakes decisions: identify the actor's goals, model the payoffs, and judge the choice against the information available at the time.