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What are the public relations implications of possible U.S. responses to the insurgent use of mosques? To the extent that defeating the insurgency in Iraq involves a successful appeal to Iraqi "hearts and minds", understanding public perceptions regarding just and unjust behavior in war provides a useful analytical tool. I am particularly interested in how the Hadith (oral traditions relating to the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) and Muslim just war theory treat the implications of conflicts at sacred sites.I begin with a brief overview of the Islamic sources used in this paper to evaluate the just war implications of fighting in mosques. I then qualify my use of these sources by considering the challenges posed by a biased selection of sources, misrepresentation of these sources and the questionable relevance of these findings to the current situation in Iraq. In the third part of this paper, I briefly survey the empirical pattern of mosque use by insurgents in Iraq, the American response to this practice and the three challenges that this situation poses to just war theory. Each of these challenges is examined in turn in the three sections that follow: the limitations on the use of force within a sacred site; the protection of civilians in or near the mosque; and the requirements that the site itself be safeguarded from violence. I offer insights into the ethical implications of each scenario based on the relevant Muslim oral traditions and jurisprudence.To demonstrate the potential contribution of just war reasoning to the management of conflicts at sacred sites despite these challenges, I conclude the paper with an analysis of a significant historical precedent, the Saudi response to a hostage crisis in Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979. This incident highlights the importance of cooperating with religious authorities who can interpret laws restricting conflict at sacred sites in a manner that is conducive to the successful conclusion of military operations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that there is an emerging consensus among realists that the U.S. should abandon its hegemonic strategy and adopt an offshore balancing strategy. Here, Iraq and the so called war terrorism (or "long war," or "global counter-insurgency," as some American officials sometimes refer to it) have been the catalysts. Increasingly, it is recognized that U.S. aims in the Persian Gulf/Middle East - and the American military presence in the region - have fueled terrorism, and caused Iran to self-defensively seek to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. A number of leading realists now argue that the best strategy for the U.S. is to extricate itself from Iraq, reduce its regional footprint, and adopt an offshore balancing strategy.In this paper, I make the case for offshore balancing as America's next grand strategy. In so doing, I argue that offshore balancing can be considered as a "wedge" (or wedge-like) strategy for two reasons. First, at the great power level, it can be used to break up potential alliances directed against the United States, and also to force possible future rivals of the United States to focus their security policies on each other rather than on counterbalancing the U.S. Second, in the Middle East an offshore balancing posture would help drain away much of the opposition to American policies that fosters Islamic terrorism directed at the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide range of efforts has been offered on "winning the peace" in Iraq. This paper examines the judgments of several comparative studies on post-conflict nation-building, and it introduces 1990s Russia as an additional source of "lessons learned". Beyond the widely recommended attention to the large and small technical tasks, or "factors", in the areas of security, democracy, administrative capacity, and economic reconstruction, this paper points to the importance of "dynamics" such as a real and lasting commitment by the United States and the coalition, the emergence of widely supported and particularly talented Iraqi leadership, and increased evidence of "learning" among Iraqi elites and masses and among the coalition and international community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bush Administration's definition of political success in post-Saddam Iraq has changed almost as frequently as their rationale for the initial military invasion. Gone are the heroically optimistic predictions of peace, economic development, religious tolerance, and multi-cultural civil society in Iraq, which would then serve as the first falling domino in an irresistible cascade of democratization throughout the Middle East. Chastened by rising military, financial, and political costs, the Administration now speaks more soberly of satisfaction with a fairly stable, some-day reasonably democratic government for the New Iraq.Despite the fact that the characterization of success has been a moving target, one definition of abject political failure in Iraq has remained a constant: the fragmentation of the country into separate, possibly warring ethno-religious enclaves. The Bush Administration's emphatic warnings regarding the consequences of Iraqi balkanization have been echoed by the governments of at least eight Arab countries in the region.Notwithstanding the Administration's best efforts, however, recent events indicate that civil war and territorial partition are increasingly likely outcomes. For instance, July 2006 was the bloodiest month so far in terms of sectarian violence in Iraq. The peril of the situation was inadvertently acknowledged the following month by a leaked diplomatic note to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the note, the outgoing British ambassador to Iraq William Patey warned that civil war and a division of Iraq "is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy". Patey's warnings were echoed just hours later by two senior American military commanders in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. Iraq's former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has stated, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." Given the preexisting hostilities between the ethnic and sectarian groups of Iraq, partition of the country in the event of civil war is increasingly probable.The heuristic exploration of just such a hypothetically fragmented Iraq is the subject of this paper. Specifically, it will apply traditional geopolitical methodologies of analysis to assess the political, economic, and military viability of an Iraq trisected into Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish political entities. In doing so, the paper will trace the roots of ethno-sectarian conflict in Iraq and compare Iraq to two divergent models of national devolution.The paper concludes that the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised from a geopolitical perspective, that the demographic conditions within Iraq suggest that civil war and partition are likely outcomes, and that while the Kurdish and Shi'a regions would be quite viable as independent states, the Sunni rump state would face daunting political, economic, and military challenges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature has examined the factors that influence immigration attitudes. Yet prior tests have considered only a few immigrant attributes at a time, limiting their capacity to test several hypotheses simultaneously. This paper uses conjoint analysis to test the influence of nine randomized immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Drawing on a two-wave, population-based panel survey, it demonstrates that Americans view educated immigrants in high-status jobs favorably, while they view those who lack plans to work, entered without authorization, come from Iraq, or do not speak English unfavorably. The results are consistent with norms-based and sociotropic explanations of immigration attitudes. Remarkably, Americans' preferences vary little with their education, partisanship, labor market position, ethnocentrism, or other attributes. Beneath partisan divisions over immigration lies a consensus about which immigrants to admit, a fact which points to limits in both theories emphasizing economic threats and those emphasizing cultural threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British and American intelligence agencies produced bad estimates of Iraqi capabilities before the war in 2003. Why? Official postwar inquiries concluded that intelligence analysts fell victim to a series of familiar pitfalls that caused them to draw false inferences from limited information. Others blamed policymakers in London and Washington for pressuring intelligence officials to exaggerate the threat. Both arguments are half-right. Analysts certainly began with incorrect but plausible assumptions of Iraqi capabilities, meaning that their estimates were always likely to conclude that Iraq possessed at least some latent unconventional capabilities. Subsequent policy pressure, however, caused intelligence officials to lean toward worst-case scenarios and stifle dissenting views. The politicization of intelligence also inhibited reassessment in the months before the war, despite new information from UN weapons inspectors that conflicted with standing estimates. This paper explores the evolution of British and American assessments and the pattern of intelligence-policy relations in both countries. It also explains why it is often impossible to understand the content of threat assessments without understanding the political context in which they are written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on American public opinion, addressing three broad clusters of issues. Section One presents survey findings on six questions about the war: Did the United States do the right thing in using force against Iraq? How well is the American military effort going? Has the undertaking in Iraq made the U.S. safer from the threat of terrorism? Has the war in Iraq been worth its costs? How long should the U.S. keep its military forces in Iraq? And finally, to what extent have the war and American difficulties in achieving the administration's central goals—a secure and democratic Iraq—divided the country along partisan lines, thereby reducing the prospects of bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the dynamics of wartime alliances and coalition warfare through the prism of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I argue that even during wartime, alliances and coalitions serve purposes beyond capability aggregation, and introduce important complexities into the operations that are absent in unilateral ones. I explore my empirical finding that multilateralism is the preferred strategy of democracies and the assumptions that underpin the use of coalitions for the purposes of garnering legitimacy. I discuss the costs and benefits of the increasing reliance of the United States on multinational operations. I conclude with a forward thinking assessment of the conditions under which states should seek to fight with their friends, when they should either opt not to fight or fight alone. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I compare American information control policy in Germany (1945-1949) and Iraq (2003-2006).The comparative analysis indicates that the American information control policy was very different in the two cases. In Germany, the U.S. Army and the Office of Military Government U.S. in Germany exerted rigorous control over the media to block Nazi and Soviet propaganda, and to introduce the American political agenda. In Iraq, the Coalition forces did not establish rigorous information control, and the Pentagon was more concerned with the manipulation of the American press than with regulating information in Iraq. As a result of this strategic error, the insurgency and civilian movements opposed to the American presence in Iraq have been able to control information and spread their anti-American messages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we measure compliance with the demands on which economic sanctions on Iraq were conditioned with rigor and precision? We argue that it is possible, but only with a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of compliance. This paper uses structured, focused comparison of cases to guide the construction of a spatial model for the study of sanctions compliance. It then uses that spatial model to examine the patterns of compliance that Iraq exhibited with the demands of the United Nations Security Council economic sanctions regime in the 1990s. We argue that a multi-method approach allows scholars to compare relative partial compliance in an innovative way. The sharpness that this methodological innovation brings to the study of compliance, we argue, provides deeper insight into the political relationship between sanctioner and sanctioned than current work on sanctions is able to provide. Our model is uniquely able to demonstrate that Iraq's relative partial compliance increased through the early and mid-1990s, decreased in the late 1990s, and increased again in the months following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. We conclude by formulating hypotheses concerning the reason behind these policy shifts on the part of the Iraqi government, which provide insight into the question of whether Iraq was the 'threat to international peace and security' that the United States claimed in its petition for Security Council aid in the invasion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003) posed an excruciating moral and strategic political dilemma. The sanctions caused immense human suffering, while doing little to unseat Saddam Hussein from power. For some, this reality created an urgent moral imperative to lift the sanctions immediately, at whatever cost. But given the absolute brutality of Saddam's regime, lifting the sanctions - and awarding the tyrant a significant political victory - seemed at best a problematic moral stance. Saddam bore some responsibility for the horrific effects of the sanctions, both in his refusal to comply fully with UN disarmament resolutions and in his cynical manipulation of the flow of humanitarian relief for his own domestic and foreign political ends. The difficult moral decisions were compounded by perplexing strategic concerns. The sanctions succeeded in preventing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and significantly weakened Iraqi military capabilities, but at the same time actually strengthened Saddam's domestic position, and by the late 1990s had evolved into a potent instrument of Iraqi foreign policy. Because sanctions are often presented as an 'ethical' or 'humane' alternative to war, they carry a particular moral burden which makes them an easy target for accusations of hypocrisy. This paper argues that the distinctively moral tone of the international argument about Iraq explains otherwise puzzling outcomes: the empowering of an otherwise quite weak transnational activist network; the rhetorical entrapment of the United States and the UK into backing the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian relief programme within the sanctions regime ("Oil for Food"); the sudden collapse of compliance with the sanctions in the late 1990s; and ultimately the failure of the United States to win international backing for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The strategic payoffs to moral argument generated great incentives for hypocrisy, which had the unfortunate result of stripping away the very possibility of generating legitimacy not only for the sanctions, but for virtually any policy towards Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans have been more widely divided by party in their evaluations of George W. Bush than they have been about any president in the more than fifty years the approval question has been polled. They are also more widely divided by party about the wisdom and necessity of his Iraq war than they have been about any major U.S. military action undertaken during the same time span. These two phenomena are closely related, yet the structure of their relationship is far from transparent. In this paper, I review a selection of the inordinately abundant survey data on the president and the Iraq war to document the polarization in public attitudes they have jointly provoked and to explore some of the questions the data can be used to address concerning the formation, evolution, and consequences of mass opinion on the war. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide attacks are best understood when analyzed on three levels of analyses: an individual level, an organizational level, and an environmental level. This paper presents a multi-causal framework for the analysis of suicide attacks and applies the model to suicide attacks in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I confront a burgeoning conventional wisdom among foreign policy scholars which holds that the US should tend to succeed in efforts to engage autocratic rogue states, such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Rather, I argue that domestic political pressures in the US and domestic political opportunities in the autocratic taget state will impel US administrations to oversell and overcommit to engagement, and impel the target state to reciprocate US engagement with merely cosmeticor tactical behavioral concessions. I proceed to test this theory in the "hard case" of the US engagement of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Owing to the highly asymmetric bilateral balances of power and interests that grossly favored the US during this engagement attempt, domestic political pressures mitigated the Reagan Administration's inclination to conditionally engage the embattled Baathist regime in Baghdad so as to reform troublesome Iraqi behavior in such issue-areas as Iraq's continued support for terrorism. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary look at the similarities and differences of the insurgencies in Iraq and Chechnay and at the similarities and differences of American and Russian counterinsurgency efforts respectively. It argues that the Russians have some inherent advantages in Chechnya--smaller country in terms of both terrain and population, greater will to fight the war--than the Americans in Iraq. However, Russian counterinsurgency policy, and in particular the over-reliance on force and failure to include Chechens in the local politics, has increased the likelihood of long-term failure. In Iraq, while the Americans have not conducted themselves flawlessly, their more measured use of force and incorporation of a wider swath of Iraqi society into the political scene increases the likelihood of long-term success. The danger for the Americans, however, is in the short-term. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bush administration has formulated a foreign policy that combines elements of realism with liberal internationalism as part of its strategy to fight the War on Terror. Tenets of American exceptionalism provide a resonant political cultural resource for sustaining an inherently contradictory policy. This paper analyzes elite media com-mentary and editorials prior to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to see if these tenets are successful in drawing support for US military action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationwide panel surveys of Americans during the last three years of the George W. Bush Administration demonstrate that the level of public trust in the national government has a significant impact on the public's perceptions of threats posed by terrorism and its support for national counter-terrorism policies, including the war in Iraq. These effects vary depending on whether "trust in the government" is defined in terms of trust in the objectivity and truthfulness of the information it provides, trust in the integrity of national politicians not to exploit that information for political or partisan purposes, or trust in the efficacy government policy. Unpacking the concept of trust in government helps to clarify the conditions under which changes in trust are likely to affect the government's ability to shape public opinion and mobilize public support for its policy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the role of organizational culture and hypocrisy in the reluctance of the U.S. Army to adapt to the low-intensity conflict in Iraq. An organizational analysis approach was adopted to examine the influence of the nature of civil-military relations within the U.S. on the Army's decision to adapt to the counter-insurgency/nation-building mission in Iraq. The challenges posed by low-intensity conflicts and the change in values in Western democratic societies are also explored.

The article examines how the U.S. Congress and U.S. citizens evaluate wars initiated by the president. Case studies of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq are discussed to illustrate how reliance on retrospective accountability is unsatisfactory in the context of peace and war. Presidential discretion with regard to the use of U.S. military power is said to virtually unchecked.

The article examines claims by politicians and pundits that criticism of the foreign policy of the administration of George W. Bush undermines the Iraq war effort. The study employed vector autoregression models to analyze weekly time series measuring U.S. public opinion of the country's foreign policy under Bush, the general level of hostility of the government towards the Ba'ath party and Iraqi insurgents, as well as the hostility of the party and insurgents towards U.S. forces in Iraq.

The discipline of public policy has placed little emphasis on how political rhetoric affects the formation of policy and in particular how presidents use rhetoric to particular advantage in problem definition, especially when it comes to defining the need for war. Most of the problem definition literature has focused primarily on the mechanics of how problems are defined, including causal stories of what is presumed to have precipitated the problem, although some recent literature has examined how problems are conceptualized by officials and the public and how presidents use crisis rhetoric to enhance their war policy or exaggerate their claims in making their case. A handful have looked at dire predictions about what the problem definer says will or will not happen if we do not accept the definer's problem definition and recommended course of action. Yet none of the public policy literature or communications literature specifically looks at how presidents rhetorically use problem definition to convince us to go to war or in particular how they use religious rhetoric to buttress their arguments. I offer a multi-disciplinary examination of how two presidents, George W. Bush (the Iraq War) and Lyndon B. Johnson (the Vietnam War), employed inherently religious terms in their pre-war rhetoric to justify war as the most viable policy option. These two leaders - Republican and Democrat, separated by almost half a decade - serve as examples of how presidents may assume the role of priestly warriors, appealing to revered American ideals by imbuing their rhetoric with transcendent meaning through the use of religious language, even harking back to a manifest destiny theme that characterizes the United States as a country called by God to right wrongs. Using content analysis of these presidents' pre-war speeches, I employ grounded theory to analyze the inherently religious terms that these presidents used most often. I investigate this research question: How were these presidents' word choices similar and different in the way they justified the need for war in religious terms? My working "hypotheses" is that Bush used more, and different, religious language than Johnson to define the need for war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2002 national survey data, we find a strong relationship between Americans' desires to avenge 9/11 and their bellicosity toward Iraq, even after controlling for the perceived terrorist threat, left-right ideology, and approval of U.S. political leaders. Prior beliefs about Iraq could have prompted suspicions of Iraqi complicity. In addition, appraisal tendency research suggests that anger and desires for revenge could have heightened out-group antipathy, displaced blaming, and optimistic assessment of war risks. We test the first of these processes and find evidence that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim antipathy partially mediated the vengeance's effect on bellicosity. Vengeance, in turn, mediated the effects of retributiveness (proxied by right-wing authoritarianism) and patriotism on public bellicosity. While perceptions of the Iraqi threat probably assumed greater importance over the course of the following year, additional survey data shows that even as war approached, most supporters acknowledged it would satisfy a desire for revenge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. failed to establish security in the aftermath of major combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. This marked a significant departure from U.S. state-building after World War II, such as Germany, Japan, and Korea, where the U.S. successfully established security. Consequently, this article asks: Under what conditions are state-building successful in establishing security? To answer this question, it examines the universe of state-building since 1945. I argue that success requires the use of overwhelming force and resources. Specifically, state-building is more successful the greater the number of troops and police in the immediate aftermath of combat, the greater the amount of financial assistance, and the longer the duration. Current arguments fail to explain this variation. Some contend that state-building is never effective. Others contend that effectiveness is largely a function of structural factors that foreign powers cannot control. Still others contend that effectiveness is correlated with multilateral participation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. government often creates ad hoc advisory commissions on national security issues. Recent examples include the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group. Yet few scholars have examined the impact of commissions. I argue that commissions can help increase support for a presidential, congressional, or partisan agenda, and can help policymakers overcome collective action problems by providing a focal point for debate. I test hypotheses about the sources of commission influence with an original data set of 39 national security commissions that reported between 1981 and 2005. I find that commissions are likely to have greater impact when they are established after a national security disaster or scandal—a finding that challenges the conventional view that such commissions only perform symbolic damage control. I also find that the recommendations of presidential commissions are adopted more often than those of agency or statutory commissions, and that, absent a crisis, commissions addressing highly salient issues are not more likely than those addressing less salient issues to influence policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores why and how Thucydides has been used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq and why, beyond this, he has become an interlocutor in current debates over American foreign policy. In what ways is he relevant and how can make sure relevance does not reduce the complexity of the text to him to specific policy prescriptions or allow him to be "used" for partisan purposes rather than be useful as a possession for all time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, the Caspian Sea region has been seen as a potential major oil and gas producer. Following the 9/11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and the 2003 war in Iraq, energy consumers have shown more interest in the Caspian region and Central Asia to supplement energy supplies from the Middle East and to contain militant Islam. This essay examines the Caspian region's energy outlook. Particular attention is given to the competing pipeline schemes. The study also analyzes the strategic rivalry between the United States, Russia, and China. It suggests that despite conflicting interests, the strategies of these global powers should not be seen in zero-sum terms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public support in the United States for the Iraq War has followed a downward trajectory akin to, but differing in important ways from, that observed for the wars in Korea and Vietnam. These differences are attributable to the particulars of the war itself, including its preventive intentions and the disconfirmation of its main pretexts, interacting with people's unusually strong prior opinions of its architect, George W. Bush. These interactions have generated the widest partisan divisions among ordinary Americans on any war and on any president going back more than 50 years. Republican support for the president and the war has remained high, and the president has also been helped by the fact that Americans remain more supportive of seeing the war to a successful conclusion than they are of having started it in the first place. Support for the war continues to ebb, but now so gradually that, barring a major deterioration of the Iraq situation, the pressure to withdraw is likely to be manageable through the end of Bush's presidency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American opinion leaders who favored the death penalty, compared to those opposed, were substantially more likely to support the 1991 Gulf War, to condone the Iraqi death toll, and to favor escalating the war to topple Saddam Hussein. These relationships persist after controlling for ideology, nationalism, and instrumental beliefs about force, and thus probably result from individual differences in retributiveness and humanitarianism, moral values known to strongly influence death penalty attitudes. These results suggest a substantial moralistic streak in elite attitudes about war against evil-seeming states, or states that are effectively framed as such by political leaders. Moral punitiveness was attenuated by foreign-policy expertise only on the regime change issue, and moderately so, suggesting that it might also influence the thinking of decision makers. President George H. W. Bush evidently experienced real moral outrage during the crisis, but he refrained from escalating to exact further punishment on Saddam. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the U.S. engages in large-scale military operations and faces loss or defeat, it is often loathed to negotiate or make concessions, due to fears about reputational costs, as well as a number of cultural and psychological factors including overconfidence, moralism, and the "lessons" of the 1930s. A multilateral setting for the use of force can help to correct the U.S. bias against compromise through a number of pathways. First, allies can directly pressure Washington to moderate its policy. Second, dovish elements in the U.S. administration can utilize the multilateral setting to outmaneuver hardliners. Third, allies and organizations can provide political cover for U.S. compromise by sharing responsibility for concessions. Multilateral uses of force produce inefficiencies and constraints, but these costs represent a premium that is paid when operations are successful, so that the U.S. has an insurance policy that minimizes loss in times of failure. When the U.S. fought in Korea, Truman had - unknowingly - taken out an insurance policy by fighting multilaterally. The presence of allies and organizations promoted a policy of American restraint that ultimately served U.S. interests. In contrast, the essentially unilateral nature of the war in Vietnam was a major reason why the U.S. was unable to negotiate or withdraw, and instead engaged in disastrous escalation. In Iraq today, President Bush's decision to fight with a "coalition of the willing" dominated by the U.S., rather than with a broad alliance under U.N. authorization, means that Washington is fighting a war without insurance. As a result, if the U.S. should fail, it will find it more difficult to withdraw. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the prewar planning process for postwar Iraq was plagues by myriad problems, including a dysfunctional interagency process, overly optimistic assumptions, and a lack of contingency planning for alternative outcomes. These problems were compounded by a lack of civilian capacity during the occupation period, which led to a complicated and often uncoordinated relationship with the military authorities who found themselves taking the lead in many reconstruction activities. Taken together, these mistakes meant that U.S. success on the battlefield was merely a prelude to a postwar insurgency whose outcome remains very much in doubt more than three years later. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki became something of a polarizing figure. To critics of the Bush administration's planning before the Iraq War, Shinseki offered a heroic voice, one of very few among senior military officers that defied political pressure in order to tell the truth about the likely costs of war before Congress. After two and a half years of bloody insurgency and two thousand U.S. deaths in Iraq, Shinseki looks more like Cassandra, cursed to prophesy accurately about impending disaster without being heeded by those with the power to change course. Yet, before accepting Shinseki's case as a pure tragedy brought on by civilian hubris, analysts should examine more closely the multiple dimensions of democratic accountability. While few would question the chief of staff's duty to inform Congress, so it can properly oversee the executive branch, enforcement of checks and balances must be weighed against the strategic value of information being revealed in open session as well as the importance of clear signaling to allies and adversaries during times of crisis. Taken in light of the full range of concerns covered by democratic accountability, the Shinseki case is rich with lessons for the future of constructive military dissent in an era of civilian ascendancy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the intimate and changing relationship between the political and the economic in the contemporary world. It discusses the U.S. effort to establish a free market economy in Iraq, which demonstrate that now more than ever, there is a particular conception of politics at stake in global efforts to govern economic relations.

The article examines the electoral consequences to U.S. legislators who opposed the authorization of the use of force in Iraq. A district level analysis shows that Democrats who opposed the Iraq resolution ran behind other incumbent Democrats in 2004. Exit polls also indicate that voter attitudes on the War on Terror and the War in Iraq closely follow partisanship and the presidential vote in structuring the vote for incumbents.

In a survey analysis of university students in the United Kingdom and the United States, we examine how political knowledge affects the influence of political cues, emotion and symbolic predisposition in the formulation of foreign policy preferences on a salient issue, the war in Iraq. We argue that accessible cues and symbolic predisposition, namely the national identity dimension of patriotism, provide for consistent cognitive shortcuts in foreign policy judgment. However, we also argue that the significance of such cognitive shortcuts diminishes when relevant political information is more available. Thus we conclude that emotion-driven affect, cues and symbolic predisposition are triggered as a convenient guide in foreign policy judgment when citizens are less informed, whereas higher levels of political information increase the significance of relevant policy preference and knowledge in the formulation of related foreign policy judgment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article determines the extent of U.S. compliance with the norm of noncombatant immunity in Iraq. Evidence and analyses presented here show that the U.S. complies with the norm of noncombatant immunity in Iraq at a much higher level than critics of the war often claim. This high level of compliance stems from strategic and organizational cultures that served as the bases of political decisions and behavior in the battlefield. It is concluded that the norm of noncombatant immunity is not enough to eliminate civilian war casualties.

The terror threat to the United States remains large and shows little sign of abating. Yet the U.S. has so far waged only a one-dimensional war against Al Qaeda. It has fought on one front when it should be fighting on four. President Bush is credited by the public for toughness on terror. In fact the Bush administration has pursued a half-hearted war on terror, failing to devote the needed financial and political resources to the effort. It also diverted itself into a costly and counterproductive sideshow in Iraq, hampering its one-dimensional efforts against Al Qaeda. Instead the Administration should wage a far stronger war on Al Qaeda. This war should be waged on every relevant front, with every available resource. All policies should be judged on their contribution to this effort, and should be oriented to serve it. The U.S. should do this because Al Qaeda is far the greatest threat that now faces the United States and failure to defeat it could bring immense calamity. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the claim of U.S. President George W. Bush to a unilateral executive warmaking power, including the authority to wage pre-emptive war, within the context of the legislation, the Use of Force Act of 2001 and the Iraqi Resolution of 2002. Theory of war power according to Bush; Authority of the Congress to initiate military hostilities according to the U.S. Constitution; Problems with the delegation of the war power in the legislation that purported to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Discusses the use of threat inflation and the marketplace of ideas regarding the U.S. war on Iraq. Requirements in assessing the risk of future failures of the marketplace of ideas; Threat inflation in the Iraq debate; Deterrability of former Iraqi leader Sadamm Hussein; Claims made by U.S. official in linking Hussein to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and to the Al-Qa'ida terrorist group.

Examines the legitimate behavior of the U.S. Definition of legitimacy according to legal scholar Thomas Franck; Relationship between the U.S. and Panama after the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1977; Support by political leaders throughout Western Europe to U.S. policies toward Iraq.

The US has entered an era of overt military interventions targeted at regime change and ?democratization.? The Bush administration inscribed the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in the larger war against terrorism. The proactive military policy of the Bush administration is based on the premise that Al Qaeda can be eradicated through mega-police/special forces operations aimed at destroying its leaders and disrupting its organizational structures. The hypothesis is that the elimination of the leaders will bring about the collapse of the Islamic terrorist movements, removing the scourge of anti-Western terrorism. My claim is that the war against terrorism will not be won by mega-police/special forces operations alone. Furthermore, the resentment against the US is not restricted to the Middle East?in fact, it is global and has multiple origins. The US is facing a global danger?Al Qaeda?s example may take hold in the ?Third World.? Future terrorist organizations using Al Qaeda?s methods do not necessarily have to be Islamic, or based in the Middle East or in Asian countries with large Muslim populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International sanctions can be positive or negative, with no compelling reasons for when states choose one type over the other. Using contractual theory, I try to explain why the United States used negative sanctions in the case of Irak but is resorting to positive sanctions in the case of North Korea. I study sanction contracts as menus of contracts established to reduce the uncertainty about the resolve of the target country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, the American public pays very little attention to international affairs, a condition that does not seem to have been changed by the events of September 11, 2001. It seems to apply a fairly reasonable, commonsensical standard of benefit and cost when evaluating foreign affairs, and is about as accepting of involvement in foreign affairs as ever, but it does not have and never has had much stomach for losing American lives in ventures and arenas that are of little concern to it and does not value foreign lives highly. Although the President does not necessarily need public support in advance to pull off a military venture, there is little or no long term political gain from successful ones. When the value of the stakes does not seem to be worth additional American lives, the public has shown a willingness to abandon an overextended or untenable position with little concern about saving face. However, if they are not being killed, American troops can remain in peace keeping or nation building ventures virtually indefinitely for the most part, nobody will even remember that they are there. In general, it seems that there is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush. Under favorable scenarios, public attention will switch to domestic issues, particularly to the troubled economy. Under quagmire ones, people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake, and starting and continuing wars that people come to consider mistaken does not enhance a president’s re electability. If Iraq does become a quagmire, the Bush administration could probably withdraw at a bearable electoral cost. The messy aftermath of the war against Iraq suggests that all or most of that self infatuated talk about a brave new superpowered American "empire" and about triumphal "unilateralism" will fade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the American military occupation of Iraq was doomed to failure from its very beginning because it was based on an unsound hypothesis of liberation. The Iraqi fiasco is the logical result of the conceptual mistake of conceiving the American mission as a liberation, and not as the occupation of an enemy country. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]