Download or read book Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare written by Tami Biddle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major revision of our understanding of long-range bombing, this book examines how Anglo-American ideas about "strategic" bombing were formed and implemented. It argues that ideas about bombing civilian targets rested on--and gained validity from--widespread but substantially erroneous assumptions about the nature of modern industrial societies and their vulnerability to aerial bombardment. These assumptions were derived from the social and political context of the day and were maintained largely through cognitive error and bias. Tami Davis Biddle explains how air theorists, and those influenced by them, came to believe that strategic bombing would be an especially effective coercive tool and how they responded when their assumptions were challenged. Biddle analyzes how a particular interpretation of the World War I experience, together with airmen's organizational interests, shaped interwar debates about strategic bombing and preserved conceptions of its potentially revolutionary character. This flawed interpretation as well as a failure to anticipate implementation problems were revealed as World War II commenced. By then, the British and Americans had invested heavily in strategic bombing. They saw little choice but to try to solve the problems in real time and make long-range bombing as effective as possible. Combining narrative with analysis, this book presents the first-ever comparative history of British and American strategic bombing from its origins through 1945. In examining the ideas and rhetoric on which strategic bombing depended, it offers critical insights into the validity and robustness of those ideas--not only as they applied to World War II but as they apply to contemporary warfare.
Download or read book Reality and Rhetoric written by P. T. Bauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reality and Rhetoric is the culmination of P. T. Bauer's observations and reflections on Third World economies over a period of thirty years. He critically examines the central issues of market versus centrally planned economies, industrial development, official direct and multinational resource transfers to the Third World, immigration policy in the Third World, and economic methodology. In addition, he has written a fascinating account of recent papal doctrine on income inequality and redistribution in the Third World. The major themes that emerge are the importance of non-economic variables, particularly people's aptitudes and mores, to economic growth; the unfortunate results of some current methods of economics; the subtle but important effects of the exchange economy on development; and the politicization of economic life in the Third World. As in Bauer's previous writings, this book is marked by elegant prose, apt examples, a broad economic-historical perspective, and the masterful use of informal reasoning.
Download or read book Conflict Prevention from Rhetoric to Reality written by Albrecht Schnabel and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What Kind of Liberation written by Nadje Sadig Al-Ali and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is something to learn, literally, on every page here."--Cynthia Enloe, from the foreword "This is a fluent and highly informed account of the women of Iraq during a time of ever increasing political turmoil, economic disaster and foreign invasion. It gives a fascinating insight into the way Iraqi society really works and is far superior in quality to most of what has been written about Iraq in war and peace."--Patrick Cockburn, author of Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
Download or read book Obama the Media and Framing the U S Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan written by Erika G. King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situating Obama’s end-of-war discourse in the historical context of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan begins with a detailed comparison with the Bush war-on-terror security narrative before examining elements of continuity and change in post-9/11 elite rhetoric. Erika King deftly employs two case studies of presidential and media framing - the weeks surrounding the formal announcements of Obama’s December 2009 'surge-then-exit' strategy from Afghanistan and the end of combat operations in Iraq in August 2010 - to explore the role of mass media in presenting presidential narratives of war and finds evidence of an interpretive disconnect between the media and a president seeking to present a more nuanced approach to keeping America safe. Eloquently scrutinizing Obama’s discourse on the U.S. exit from two post-9/11 wars and contrasting the presidential endgame frame with the U.S. mainstream media’s narratives of the wars’ meaning, accomplishments, and denouement provides a unique combination of qualitative content analysis and topical case studies and makes this volume an ideal resource for scholars and researchers grappling with the complicated and ever-evolving nexus of war, the president, and the media.
Download or read book The Discourse of Propaganda written by John Oddo and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-01-18 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process. Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse. By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating America’s recent military interventions.
Download or read book To Start a War written by Robert Draper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 “The detailed, nuanced, gripping account of that strange and complex journey offered in Robert Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is essential reading—now, especially now . . . Draper’s account [is] one for the ages . . . A must-read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most consequential decision in the history of American foreign policy--the decision to invade Iraq. Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of consequential new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. Draper's fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
Download or read book The Unfinished Business of the Civil Rights Movement written by Frank Simpkins and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unfinished Business of the Civil Rights Movement: Failure of America's Public Schools to Properly Educate its African American Student Populations by Frank Simpkins The Unfinished Business of the Civil Rights Movement: Failure of America's Public Schools to Properly Educate its African American Student Population vividly describes the current crisis of America's inability to properly educate its African American students. Many of the details and cited statistics indicate alarming illiteracy rates and high dropout rates for disadvantaged Black and Latino students across the country. These rates stand in sharp contrast to those of their White peers and the Black/White academic achievement gap continues to widen. The author mentions other problems that afflict the Black community, including the horrendous incarceration rates of young Black males, the shocking rates of Black abortions, and the "precarious and implosive" condition of the Black family in America. He contends that the core of these problems lay with America's failure to properly educate its Black students. These alarming figures are more than just statistics; they have widespread consequences upon American society. The author highlights a proven and scientifically tested dialect reading program that showed promising results for Black functionally illiterate inner-city students in grades 7-12. He urges that a Second Civil Rights movement is needed to gain equal quality educational opportunities for all of America's children. We cannot deny these rights to some children without disparaging all children and the nation. About the Author Frank Simpkins co-authored the book Between the Rhetoric and Reality with his brother, Gary Simpkins. He has served a number of years in the K-12 system and as Director of Educational Opportunities, Programs, and Services at Barstow Community College District.
Download or read book Explaining the Iraq War written by Frank P. Harvey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The almost universally accepted explanation for the Iraq War is very clear and consistent - the US decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime on March 19, 2003 was a product of the ideological agenda, misguided priorities, intentional deceptions and grand strategies of President George W. Bush and prominent 'neoconservatives' and 'unilateralists' on his national security team. Despite the widespread appeal of this version of history, Frank P. Harvey argues that it remains an unsubstantiated assertion and an underdeveloped argument without a logical foundation. His book aims to provide a historically grounded account of the events and strategies which pushed the US-UK coalition towards war. The analysis is based on both factual and counterfactual evidence, combines causal mechanisms derived from multiple levels of analysis and ultimately confirms the role of path dependence and momentum as a much stronger explanation for the sequence of decisions that led to war.
Download or read book War Plan Iraq written by Milan Rai and published by Verso. This book was released on 2002-11-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the United States' hidden role in the collapse of the U.N. weapons inspection agency, UNSCOM, this book demonstrates that a war with Iraq would be in violation of international law and could precipitate a world recession with dire consequences for the world's poor.
Download or read book W Stands for Women written by Michaele L. Ferguson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-29 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVEssays that examine the Bush adminstration's deployment of feminist rhetoric and the effects of the administration's policies on women, feminism, and gender roles in the U.S./div
Download or read book Brute Reality written by Stuart Price and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an analysis of those formal attempts, made by prominent social actors, to present a rationale for the existence and exercise of coercive power. The author shows that the 'war on terror' and its associated campaigns are an aggressive attempt to assert the contradictory interests of a trans-national elite. The period chosen to illustrate the key characteristics of this enterprise extends from the state of 'war' created after the September 11th attacks to the strategic adjustments begun during the nadir of the Iraq adventure. The shift in policy of the Obama administration is also analyzed. The book contains a wealth of transcripts and media sources, from Business Week's coverage of the Afghanistan campaign to the rhetorical pronouncements of leading politicians. Brute Reality provides students of media studies with a critical insight into a number of influential structures that have helped to shape contemporary attitudes to warfare.
Download or read book Iraq s Dysfunctional Democracy written by David Ghanim Ph.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Iraq since 2003 and argues that a new democratic Iraq cannot be grounded on destructive politics of victimization, narrow nationalism, sectarian confessionalism, and a consensual, power-sharing political arrangement. This book provides an in-depth analysis from an Iraqi perspective on the political development in Iraq since 2003, thereby filling a gap that currently exists in the discussion of this embattled nation. Within its pages, author David Ghanim scrutinizes the many contradictions of the new experience in Iraq and exposes the myth of a "new democratic Iraq." By providing a unflinching look at the dysfunctional nature of democracy in Iraq, the centrality of violence in Iraqi society and politics, and the deterioration of the rights and treatment of minorities and women in Iraq, Iraq's Dysfunctional Democracy exposes how the New Iraq after the nearly decade-long involvement of the United States is becoming a republic of corruption. Complex issues such as ethnic federalism, ethno-sectarian elections, politics of victimization, deceptive legitimacy, and the effects of de-Ba'athification are covered in detail, serving to illuminate the multilayered obstacles to stabilizing Iraq—a country that serves as the linchpin for the security of the Middle East as well as the rest of the world.
Download or read book For the Love of Humanity written by Ayça Çubukçu and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated against the war that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies were planning to wage in Iraq. Despite this being the largest protest in the history of humankind, the war on Iraq began the next month. That year, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation. Like the earlier tribunal on Vietnam convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the WTI sought to document—and provide grounds for adjudicating—war crimes committed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allied forces during the Iraq war. For the Love of Humanity builds on two years of transnational fieldwork within the decentralized network of antiwar activists who constituted the WTI in some twenty cities around the world. Ayça Çubukçu illuminates the tribunal up close, both as an ethnographer and a sympathetic participant. In the process, she situates debates among WTI activists—a group encompassing scholars, lawyers, students, translators, writers, teachers, and more—alongside key jurists, theorists, and critics of global democracy. WTI activists confronted many dilemmas as they conducted their political arguments and actions, often facing interpretations of human rights and international law that, unlike their own, were not grounded in anti-imperialism. Çubukçu approaches this conflict by broadening her lens, incorporating insights into how Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Iraqi High Tribunal grappled with the realities of Iraq's occupation. Through critical analysis of the global debate surrounding one of the early twenty-first century's most significant world events, For the Love of Humanity addresses the challenges of forging global solidarity against imperialism and makes a case for reevaluating the relationships between law and violence, empire and human rights, and cosmopolitan authority and political autonomy.
Download or read book Iraq since the Invasion written by Keiko Sakai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the complex events and unexpected outcomes of military intervention by the United States and its allies in Iraq in 2003. Considering the long-term outcomes of the intervention, this volume examines economic collapse, societal disorder, and increased regional conflict in Iraq. The book assesses the means by which American strategists imposed a new political order, generalising corruption, sectarian preference, and ethnic cleansing, and stimulating mass population movements in and from Iraq. Mobilising a multidisciplinary perspective, the book explores the rise and fall of Iraq’s confessional leaders, the emergence of a popular movement for reform, and the demands of young radicals focused upon revolutionary change. The product of years of intensive research by Iraqis and international scholars, Iraq since the Invasion considers how an initiative designed to produce “regime change” favourable to the United States and its allies brought unprecedented influence for Iran—both in Iraq and the wider Gulf region. It analyses events in Kurdistan and the impacts of change on relations between Iraq and its neighbours. The book includes a wealth of detail on political, social, and cultural change, and on the experiences of Iraqis during long years of upheaval. It will be of value to researchers and students interested in international relations, development studies, and Middle East politics.
Download or read book Middle East Contemporary Survey Volume Xvi 1992 written by Ami Ayalon and published by The Moshe Dayan Center. This book was released on 1994-12 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of contributors explore contemporary Middle East countries and look at how and if, they have moved forward. It looks at the rise of religious extremists and the Arab-Israeli peace process, stimulated by the change of government in Israel.
Download or read book Words are Weapons written by Philippe-Joseph Salazar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to offer a rigorous, sophisticated analysis of ISIS's rhetoric and why it is so persuasive ISIS wages war not only on the battlefield but also online and in the media. Through a close examination of the words and images ISIS uses, with particular attention to the "digital caliphate" on the web, Philippe-Joseph Salazar theorizes an aesthetic of ISIS and its self-presentation. As a philosopher and historian of ideas, well versed in both the Western and the Islamic traditions, Salazar posits an interpretation of Islam that places speech--the profession of faith--at the center of devotion and argues that evocation of the simple yet profound utterance of faith is what gives power to the rhetoric that ISIS and others employ. At the same time, Salazar contends that Western discourse has undergone a "rhetorical disarmament." To win the fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism, Western democracies, their media, politicians, and counterterrorism agencies must consider radically changing their approach to Islamic extremism.
