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Cloaked in the ambition of the "war on terror" and buoyed by the unwavering post-9/11 support, the United States engaged in a bombing campaign in Iraq followed by an invasion in March 2003. In preparation for the 2003 invasion, the United States built a complicated case for war based on several problematic bodies of evidence and then presented this evidence to the American people and the international community; this disputed evidence was collected to justify the invasion of Iraq. The tenets of the case for war included: the connection of Saddam Hussein to the events of 9/11, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the unknown motives and future actions of an evil dictator. The United States is now over five years into the war, and the overarching sentiment among the American people is that the war in Iraq was based on faulty information and that "evidence" used to justify the war was either mostly unfounded or even fabricated. Given this problematic evidence to support the official justifications for war, the research question is "Why did the United States still invade Iraq in March 2003?" Clearly, there is not a definitive answer to the research question. The variables for engaging in war are very complex. Often times the benefit of time passage will allow scholars to obtain a more focused understanding of "why" a sovereign power engaged in a particular war. We are not yet at a point where we can write definitively about "why" the US invaded Iraq in 2003. However, it is possible to present an analytical case regarding the reasons used in the time leading up to the US invasion of Iraq. In this thesis, the evidence has been explored, and the result is a presentation, an assessment of the evidence to make a case for why the US invaded Iraq. Many different political opinions and theories have been advanced to explain why the United States entered this war. Several credible scholars and journalists have made meaningful contributions to the study of this war and the justifications used by the White House for it. It is possible to provide a preliminary framework for understanding why the United States invaded Iraq by using current events literature, official documents and other available sources to document the war in the absence of the official, classified documents. Based on an assessment of available evidence, this thesis proposes that one of the primary reasons for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 centers on oil; the US was interested in protecting its oil interests and what the White House saw as US geo-strategic position in the Middle East. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetoric and subsequent media framing of President George W. Bush during the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how such frames have been able to generate and sustain a national moral panic. While a number of scholars have explored the effect of presidential rhetoric in generating panic (53; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hawdon 2001; Kappeler and Kappeler 2004), none have evaluated the effect of media framing on such rhetoric. This study will use three major sources of data: (1) National Public Opinion Data from Gallup Poll, (2) daily USA Today news articles, and (3) rates of international terrorism from the U.S. State Department. Employing a content analysis of USA Today articles pertaining to terrorism, I will evaluate the relevant themes used by the corporate media to frame the Bush administration's rhetoric, and further analyze the relationship between such rhetoric and the collective conscience across the eight years of the Bush presidency, while controlling for rates of international terrorism. / Master of Science

This research examines changes in the depiction of Muslims in Islamic-themed children's literature over two time strata, one decade before and one decade after the events of September 11, 2001. Random sampling with replacement across the two strata yielded a total sample of 59 books, examined at three coding levels: bibliographic data, story/plot data (genre, rural/urban setting, time epoch, conflict type, conflict context, religious instruction), and primary character data (age, culture/ethnicity, and gender). Content is examined using both quantitative comparisons of manifest characteristics and qualitative comparison of emergent themes. Mann-Whitney U tests revealed no statistically significant changes regarding the quantities of manifest features, while additional qualitative analyses suggest six substantive latent thematic changes identified with respect to genre (3), time epoch/setting (1), conflict type (1), and gender related to conflict type (1). Regarding genre, while the quantity of books with humor, with Arabic glossary additions and those employing non-fiction are consistent, the kinds of humor, the nature of glossaria and the subject focus of non-fictions are believed to have changed. With respect to a story's setting, shifts are identified in the treatment of rural and urban spaces, even while most books continue to be set in rural locales. Finally, with respect to a story's conflict type and the primary characters engaged in that conflict, it is believed that changes are evident with respect to self-versus-self conflict type and that female characters are generally lacking in stories of self-identity discovery. / Master of Science

By applying a series of overlapping models it seems possible to account for the crime of 9/11, and its subsequent atrocities, with some degree of certainty. These models, the Propaganda Model, the Pentagon System and Top-Down Democracy, interconnect in ways that enforce the Iron Rule of Oligarchy and its unmitigated mis-use of power. It is, thereby, helpful to consider this complex triad as a Rosetta when decoding the diverse functions of American Foreign Policy and its interaction with the American people. But the synergistic effect of these elements is an imposed Synthetic Hegemony that has powerful historic consequences. In the alternative, its devastating effects on the cultures and peoples of the world are well known.

A presente dissertação tem por objetivo compreender de que maneira se dá a representação do trauma em Let the Great World Spin (2009), do premiado autor irlandês, Colum McCann. O romance foi escrito para falar sobre os ataques terroristas de 11 de Setembro de 2001, Nova Iorque, muito embora o evento não tenha sido diretamente mencionado no romance. A análise levou em conta declarações do próprio autor, de que não importa sobre o que escreva, é sempre sobre a Irlanda que fala e com isso houve a necessidade de se encontrar traumas comuns a Irlanda e aos Estados Unidos. Sendo essa a razão pela qual os aspectos \'imigração\' e \'família\' fazem parte deste estudo, pois a emigração repercutiu enormemente na configuração da família irlandesa. Ao ambientar o romance na Nova Iorque de 7 de Agosto de 1974, o autor já estabelece um distanciamento temporal e um recorte específico em que semelhanças entre 1974 e 2001 são realçadas no romance. A presença do artista francês Philippe Petit, que andou em um cabo de aço estendido entre as torres gêmeas, no que ficou conhecido como o maior crime artístico do século XX, estabelece a metáfora com o que em 2001 ficou conhecido como o maior ato terrorista do século XXI. Autores como Sztompka, Versluys, Smelser e Gibbs foram norteadores para a evolução da análise do trauma retratado no texto de Colum McCann. O romance opera com um grande número de vozes narrativas, provocando uma polifonia que atende ao objetivo do autor de dificultar ao máximo a estereotipia de suas personagens. / This dissertation is concerned with the representation of trauma in the award-winning celebrated Irish writer Colum McCann\'s novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009). The novel was written about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in New York. Although the event is never directly mentioned within the text. My analysis took account of some statements made by the author to the effect that no matter what he writes about, he is always talking about Ireland. This creates the need to find common traumas between Ireland and the United States. For this reason, the topics of \'migration\' and \'family\' are part of this dissertation, as emigration impacted enormously on the compostion of the Irish family. Moreover, setting the novel in New York, on 7 August, 1974, suggests a temporal distancing in which commonalities between 1974 and 2001 are highlighted in the novel. The presence of the French artist, Philippe Petit, who walked in a tightrope between the Twin Towers, as a reference to the biggest artistic crime of the 20th Century, establishes the metaphorical link to what may be understood as the most savage terrorist act of the 21st Century. Scholars such as Sztompka, Versluys, Smelser and Gibbs were highly useful to the development of the analysis of the trauma portrayed in Colum McCann\'s text. The novel provides a polyphony of narrative voices, which assist the author to avoid stereotyping the characters.

A presente dissertação tem por objetivo compreender de que maneira se dá a representação do trauma em Let the Great World Spin (2009), do premiado autor irlandês, Colum McCann. O romance foi escrito para falar sobre os ataques terroristas de 11 de Setembro de 2001, Nova Iorque, muito embora o evento não tenha sido diretamente mencionado no romance. A análise levou em conta declarações do próprio autor, de que não importa sobre o que escreva, é sempre sobre a Irlanda que fala e com isso houve a necessidade de se encontrar traumas comuns a Irlanda e aos Estados Unidos. Sendo essa a razão pela qual os aspectos \'imigração\' e \'família\' fazem parte deste estudo, pois a emigração repercutiu enormemente na configuração da família irlandesa. Ao ambientar o romance na Nova Iorque de 7 de Agosto de 1974, o autor já estabelece um distanciamento temporal e um recorte específico em que semelhanças entre 1974 e 2001 são realçadas no romance. A presença do artista francês Philippe Petit, que andou em um cabo de aço estendido entre as torres gêmeas, no que ficou conhecido como o maior crime artístico do século XX, estabelece a metáfora com o que em 2001 ficou conhecido como o maior ato terrorista do século XXI. Autores como Sztompka, Versluys, Smelser e Gibbs foram norteadores para a evolução da análise do trauma retratado no texto de Colum McCann. O romance opera com um grande número de vozes narrativas, provocando uma polifonia que atende ao objetivo do autor de dificultar ao máximo a estereotipia de suas personagens. / This dissertation is concerned with the representation of trauma in the award-winning celebrated Irish writer Colum McCann\'s novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009). The novel was written about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in New York. Although the event is never directly mentioned within the text. My analysis took account of some statements made by the author to the effect that no matter what he writes about, he is always talking about Ireland. This creates the need to find common traumas between Ireland and the United States. For this reason, the topics of \'migration\' and \'family\' are part of this dissertation, as emigration impacted enormously on the compostion of the Irish family. Moreover, setting the novel in New York, on 7 August, 1974, suggests a temporal distancing in which commonalities between 1974 and 2001 are highlighted in the novel. The presence of the French artist, Philippe Petit, who walked in a tightrope between the Twin Towers, as a reference to the biggest artistic crime of the 20th Century, establishes the metaphorical link to what may be understood as the most savage terrorist act of the 21st Century. Scholars such as Sztompka, Versluys, Smelser and Gibbs were highly useful to the development of the analysis of the trauma portrayed in Colum McCann\'s text. The novel provides a polyphony of narrative voices, which assist the author to avoid stereotyping the characters.

The main aim of the final thesis is to assess American foreign and security policy during 2001 -- 2008 using concepts of security and strategic culture. Security and strategic culture (SSC) are rather new concepts in IR, but always more attention is paid to them. Poststructuralist conception was chosen as to be the main approach towards these concepts, since it enables to work with discursive actions of strategic and security elites. On the theoretical plane, concepts of SSC are elaborated and theoretically separated. The practical level scrutinizes how the SSC influenced the key decisions within examined period and what impact strategic and security elites had on changes of SSC. The last, assessing level, analyzes how the changes of the SSC identified on practical level, influenced American foreign and security policy and also main doctrinal documents. The main focus is on the attacks of 9/11 which had a great impact on such turbulent times, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were fought in response to the above mentioned attacks, and changes of the foreign and security policy of the USA in the light of the unsuccessful Global War on Terror.