Suchergebnisse

For a considerable period, the ISAF mission of the German army to Afghanistan has been opposed by a majority of German citizens. This discrepancy between elite decisions & public opinion suggests that the process of political representation does not work smoothly. This paper shows that political elites hardly engaged in political leadership concerning this issue. Moreover, voters did not give strong incentives for elite responsiveness by casting policy votes on the Afghanistan issue. Even in the 2009 election, the Afghanistan issue did not play a major role in voting choice. At the same time, public opinion appears to have affected elite decisions. Accordingly, the process of political representation appears to work more smoothly than suggested at a first glance. Adapted from the source document.

In Surprise, Surprise, Daniel Benjamin & Steven Simon suggest that Richard Falkenrath's criticisms of their The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right has presented a factless tirade. In summing up the main arguments of the text, Falkenrath's assertions are countered. In Falkenrath Replies, Falkenrath calls Benjamin & Simon's response intemperate, arguing that it reinforces his charges that their book's scholarship is poor, its analysis derivative, its assessments unbalanced, & its prescriptions weak. After lamenting their ad hominem attack, Falkenrath address two points of fact that Benjamin & Simon raised about reviews of the book & their allegation that US prosecutors threatened the so-called Lackawanna Six with an enemy combatant designation. J. Zendejas

On the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, the article reflects on American policy decisions in its war on terror, including wars waged in Afghanistan & Iraq, its treatment of detainees, & international cooperation. The effectiveness of terrorist movements is also discussed.

In the second half of 2002, US intelligence was catching up with policy on Iraq, & doing so in circumstances where the Bush administration's stake in this policy had become extraordinarily high. The intelligence community succumbed, & glossed over the fact that it had too few 'dots' to make confident judgments on WMD in Iraq. Adapted from the source document.

America's political heritage is the libertarian values that led to the Revolution. Colonial Americans wanted autonomy -- freedom from British rule. That heritage should be the essence of contemporary US foreign policy. Libertarianism as an ideological system is based on self-ownership; no person is allowed to own or disenfranchise another or to use force to take another's life or property. Force can only be used in self-defense, for which firm criteria must be established. If this is true for people, why should it not be applied to states in the form of noninterventionism? The application of noninterventionism (which could be equated with isolationism) vs imperialism (its opposite) is examined historically from the early 19th century. It is concluded that interventionism as an ideology belongs to neither Right nor Left & could be adopted by either Democrats or Republicans, thereby creating a real choice for Americans as to what direction our nation should take. References. J. Stanton