Search

This paper examines the ways that major U.S. news magazines constructed and portrayed public opinion during the run-up to the Iraq war. Focusing on reports in Time and Newsweek, the paper focuses on the context for opinion and news coverage, the degree to which coverage of public opinion was focused and explicit to rather vague and general, and the emphasis on world opinion. Furthermore, the paper analyzes reports of present public opinion in terms of their emphasis on past, contemporaneous and future public opinion. A wave of recent scholarship on the construction of public opinion has given new insights into the place of public opinion in American democracy. (See Ginsberg; The Captive Public; Herbst, Numbered Voices; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Herbst, Reading Public Opinion; Fried, Muffled Echoes; Fried and Cole, ? Talking About Public Opinion and Public Opinion Yet To Come: Media and Legislator Constructions of Public Opinion in the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal; ?Hart et al., ?Constructing the Electorate During Presidential Campaigns;? and Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don?t Pander.) This paper contributes to this research on the construction of public opinion by analyzing the ways public opinion analysis is embedded within news stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various media and academic sources alleged the politicization of United States intelligence leading to the 2003 Iraq War. However, two government bodies tasked to investigate the overall intelligence prior to the Iraq War, the Senate Select Committee and the Silberman-Rob Commission, concluded that intelligence was not politicized prior to the war. These conflicting views create a puzzle. Was intelligence politicized prior to the Iraq War or was it not? This question addresses the larger issue of the nexus between the intelligence community and decision-makers in the U.S. foreign policy-making process. Recognizing the intelligence community as an important actor in foreign policy-making, this paper first examines the meaning of intelligence politicization within the existing academic literature. Building upon Alexander George's framework of trade-off dilemmas in Presidential decision-making, it places existing concepts of intelligence politicization into an adapted framework that accounts for both policy-makers and intelligence professionals. The paper then uses this framework to assess the specific case of the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, analyzing the period between the 9/11 attack and the start of the 2003 war. It most specifically scrutinizes the official reports issued by the above investigative bodies and concludes that intelligence politicization did indeed occur prior to the Iraq War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will attempt to critically examine the effectiveness, or persuasiveness, of the rhetoric at the core of President Bush's Iraq policy. I have previously focused principally on a detailed examination of the structure of the president's message, first in terms of the appeals made to mobilize the public for war, and then in terms of rhetoric employed in the period May 1, 2003 to the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Here the president's rhetoric conformed closely to the central premises of counterinsurgency policy traditionally articulated by American foreign policy makers. In this previous work, I only suggested that Bush rhetoric suffers from significant credibility problems, and that the domestic political context Bush faced presented an increasingly difficult rhetorical situation. The president's rhetoric has of course avoided any portrayal of post-Saddam Iraq as a quagmire conflict (bringing with it analogies to Vietnam). The credibility of his rhetoric, however, has always been dependent upon events on the ground, and thus the metaphor of quagmire is not so easily dismissed. Certainly, an attempt to establish the causal effect of rhetoric is a difficult task, but in the present paper I will set presidential arguments in the context of patterns of public opinion and media coverage to offer suggestions about whether Bush' s message is, to use George Edwards' phrase (2003), "falling on deaf ears." In this, the paper I am working on elaborates on the analysis done (for a more limited time period) by Gershkoff and Kushner (2005). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2006 mid-terms have been defined as a national referendum on the performance of the president and the War in Iraq (Kernell 1975; Tufte 1978; Fiorina 2005). While these national factors weighed heavily on voters' psyche, the economic vote still played a significant role in explaining variation among voters' decision at the polls and the electoral fortunes of House members. This paper will address three broad questions to explain the outcome of House elections during the 2006 election: First how did voters' retrospective and prospective expectations of the economy affect their vote choice? Second, what impact did candidates' fundraising, national and local economic factors, as well as voters' perceptions of the president, have on determining the outcome of the election? Third, how did these factors compare to past elections in explaining variation both between and within House districts? Overall the paper will focus on two units of measurement to analyze the outcome of the 2006 election: First it will analyze the election outcome from the congressional district level. Second, it will assess and analyze individual-level voter preferences. To situate this election in context of previous elections, this analysis will compare it to previous House congressional elections from 1980-2006. For data that analyzes congressional districts, data has been compiled from the following sources: The Federal Elections Commission, U.S. Census, House Clerk, U.S. Department of Labor, and the Almanac of American Politics. Data that analyzes individual-level voter behavior will be composed of pooled cross-sectional surveys from exit poll surveys from 1980-2006. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both in its rhetoric and in its practice, the George W. Bush administration has pursued policies consistent with a grand strategy of primacy. Its policy actions toward Iraq reflect that orientation. However, in the context of its ongoing commitment to Iraq, the United States also has been confronted with a variety of other ongoing and emerging policy problems, including, but not limited to North Korea, Iran, ballistic missile defense, Darfur, and global climate change. As the Bush administration has sought to formulate consistent policies toward these other issue areas, it has become increasingly clear that in light of continued operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in the context of the on-going war on terror, current capabilities of the US have seriously constrained the ability of the US to effectively pursue policy options consistent with an overarching strategy primacy in these areas. This paper will examine the ways in which current US conventional force structure has been and remains inadequate to meet the requirements for a unilateral approach in addressing additional problem areas. The paper will also examine the extent to which various aspects of the US fiscal position have acted as a practical limit upon an effective grand strategy of primacy. In combination, these two constraining factors increasingly may force the US and the Bush administration to shift to a strategy of selective engagement or cooperative international engagement, regardless of its rhetorical position. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I would also be willing to serve as a discussant for papers in the areas of American foreign policy, international law, or international relations theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bush Administration has been adamant about framing its counter terrorism efforts as a "War on Terror". This framing has manifested itself in the logic of the administration's strategy and the militarization of its policy. However, as the war in Iraq has developed into a counterinsurgency, there has been a rebirth of counterinsurgency doctrine within the American military. This new military doctrine calls into question the traditional logic of warfare and redefines the wartime roles of civil and military organizations. In this paper, I will apply the counterinsurgency doctrine being used in Iraq to the broader US effort against terrorist organizations around the globe. I will analyze current US strategy and organization in terms of this doctrine and place particular emphasis on areas of US policy in which the dictates of Counterinsurgency doctrine run counter to those of conventional military wisdom. Also, using the framework of counterinsurgency doctrine (particularly its emphasis on establishing legitimacy) will allow me to examine the role globalization plays in enhancing and/or diminishing US legitimacy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the questions that scholars will wrestle with for some time is: what impact has the war in Iraq had on the US, Iraq, and the world. It is difficult to answer this question because there are so many implications of the war. It is easy to focus on the body count, or the role of private contractors, or the use of intelligence. Yet, there are literally dozens of other issues, be they the policy on torture, or US anti-terrorist legislation and the Patriot Act This paper will provide something of a laundry list of issues that the war has raised, and then provide a brief critique of the Bush policy in those areas. By providing a broad and inclusive assessment of these various affected areas, we can begin to appreciate the long-term impact of the decision to go to war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did the U.S.-led coalition intervene in Iraq in 2003? Why is the intervention an apparent failure? Why is this operation still on-going? These questions will long remain enigmatic. This paper proposes to give an answer to these questions based on the U.S. domestic politics and the structure of decision-making in the U.S. More specifically, we focus on the role played by public opinion in the shaping of foreign policy. Our findings lead to a model where the understanding of the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy need to be framed as evolving over time. Three different variables bring rhythm (more or less cyclical) to this timeframe: the level of consensus among political elites, external events and elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comparatively analyzes four major IR theories - Realism, Statism, Neo-pluralism, and World System Theory - and examines how these paradigms explain the Post-Cold War World. I'm particularly interested in these four perspectives' interpretation of globalization and the US - Iraq War. I start with a brief analysis of realism, statism, neo-pluralism, ans world system theory. I then look into these theories' different views of globalization and the US-Iraq War that have dominated post-Cold War world politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author highlights the difference between engaging in a war for oil and engaging in a war in which oil is one of the factors. She states that a new polling highlights that the majority of people in the Muslim nations view the war on terrorism of the U.S. as a means to control the Middle East oil resources. She talks about the Iraq war and highlights the conflict in Libya in the context of the issue of oil.