Mansoor Moaddel, Mark Tessler, and Ronald Inglehart
Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
MANSOOR MOADDEL, MARK TESSLER, and RONALD INGLEHART use findings from two national values surveys that were carried out in Iraq in 2004 and 2006 to determine the attitudes of the Sunni Arabs toward Saddam Hussein, which they use as a proxy measure of their attitudes toward the Sunni insurgency and American-led coalition forces.
ROBERT JERVIS analyzes what the memoirs of George Tenet and Douglas Feith tell us about themselves and about the Bush administration's war on terror and war in Iraq. He argues that as accounts of failures, they have the difficult task of defending without seeming defensive, and in the end are as important for what they reveal inadvertently as for the information they mean to convey.
In recent decades, the American jury has increasingly come under attack by critics who maintain that jurors are too often uninformed, irresponsible, biased, unable or unwilling to follow instructions, and incapable of understanding scientific and expert evidence. In American Juries, Neil Vidmar and Valerie Hans, two of the nationʼs foremost experts on jury trials, consider, evaluate, and largely reject these criticisms.
This is a hard book to tackle. It is not as clearly organized as it might have been, and (especially in the opening theoretical chapters) its thread often gets lost in difficult, repetitive, jargon-laden prose. Yet for anyone interested in insurgency and counterinsurgency, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or late-period Soviet military history, the book is worth the effort. Abdulkader H. Sinno sheds new light on the organizational politics and sociology of Afghanistanʼs morphing militia groups, and on the 30 years of warfare engulfing the country from the Soviet invasion of 1979 to todayʼs NATO-led peace enforcement operations.
Can terrorism, defined to mean “the direct attack on innocents for political purposes,” ever be justified? Uwe Steinhoff, a political philosopher at Oxford University, argues that there are indeed some circumstances in which the answer may be yes. Much of his analysis focuses on traditional just-war theoryʼs prohibition of attacks on noncombatants, and what he considers to be its unconvincing equation of noncombatants with “innocents,” who by virtue of their innocence must be immune from attack, even in a defensive just war. In essence, his argument is that adult civilians who support an aggressive and unjust war carried out by their democratically elected government are not truly innocent. He has in mind Israelis and Americans, and I shall argue that this creates real problems in his argument
Modern adherents of a “Third Way” in American public administration and politics such as the Democratic Leadership Council say they move beyond “left-right debates” and have argued for innovative bottom-up public management instead of what they describe as inflexible and traditional top-down bureaucracies. One key approach to implementing this includes encouraging community nonprofits to play a pivotal role in providing societal services. Contrary to this assertion, Colleen M. Grogan and Michael K. Gusmanoʼs new book finds a lack of a vigorousness of nonprofit public voice for administrative innovation and increased health care services for the poor with Connecticutʼs Medicaid Managed Care Council advisory board from 1995 to 1997. Connecticutʼs proposed program reforms included cost controls, program quality improvements, and greater health care access. Proponents also argued that competitive bidding for service contracts was the best approach to implementing these goals.
On 20 January 2009, either Barack Obama or John McCain will place his hand on a bible, swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, and become the forty-fourth president of the United States. The new president will immediately become responsible for the issues on which he campaigned, those that he ignored but for which he will nonetheless be held accountable, and all those unanticipated issues for which he will also be expected to devise solutions.
OMAR G. ENCARNACIÓN examines Spain's ongoing effort to reconcile the legacy of its dark past, including the mass killings of the Spanish Civil War and the repression of the Franco dictatorship, three decades after its celebrated transition to democracy. Key among his findings is that contrary to the widespread conventional wisdom promoted by the influential ''transitional justice'' movement, reconciliation is not a pre-condition for effective democratization.
MARK A. WOLFGRAM discusses the costs of early failures in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations mission in Kosovo after June 1999. The failure of NATO and the UN to secure basic human rights for Kosovo's non-Albanian minorities raises serious questions about the future of similar militarized humanitarian interventions.
ROBERT J. BRYM and BADER ARAJ contest Mia Bloom's out-bidding thesis, which holds that suicide attacks are a currency for outbidding rivals in the competition for popular support. They find that public opinion data are inconsistent with the outbidding thesis and argue that support for suicide bombing is more a function of social solidarity than competition within the Palestinian community.