Kenneth Michael Pollack (born 1966) is an American former CIA intelligence analyst and commentator on Middle East politics and military affairs. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on international relations. Currently, he is the Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute. He was previously a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.

Born to a Jewish family, Pollack obtained a BA from Yale University, in 1988, and went on to earn a PhD from MIT, under supervision of Barry Posen, in 1996.

Pollack is married to Andrea Koppel, the daughter of the well-known broadcast journalist Ted Koppel.

He has served in a variety of roles in government. From 1988 until 1995, he was an analyst on Iraqi and Iranian military issues for the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent a year as Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs with the United States National Security Council. In 1999, he rejoined the NSC as the Director for Persian Gulf Affairs. He also served two stints as a professor with the National Defense University.

Outside of government, he worked for the Brookings Institution as the director of research at its Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He previously worked for the Council of Foreign Relations as their director of national security studies. He has also written seven books, the first two of which were published in 2002. His first monograph, Arabs at War, examined the foreign policy of six Arab nations in the years between World War II and the Persian Gulf War.

He currently is an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program of Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service.

In his second book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (pub. 2002), Pollack details the history of United States actions against Iraq since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. He says that the United States should invade Iraq, and describes ways of going about it. Pollack argued that Saddam Hussein was simply too volatile and aggressive in his policies to be trusted not to begin another conflict in a volatile region. In The Threatening Storm, Pollack argued "the only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam's regime, and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction." Pollack predicted, "It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars." Likewise, he wrote, "we should not exaggerate the danger of casualties among American troops. U.S. forces in Bosnia have not suffered a single casualty from hostile action because they have become so attentive and skillful at force protection."

Pollack is credited with persuading liberals of the case for the Iraq war. New York Times columnist Bill Keller, in supporting the Iraq war in 2003, wrote "Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season, has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush." Liberal writer Matthew Yglesias in the LA Times also attested to Pollack's influence: