Within days of a major failed strike by attack helicopters during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) analysts were questioning the value of such platforms on the modern battlefield. As OIF moved from combat to stability operations, helicopter losses from enemy action actually increased seemingly strengthening the argument of those who see the helicopter as unsuitable to some combat operations. Attack helicopter operations have diverged into two distinct categories, interdiction and close air support (CAS), since their inception. This thesis argues that attack helicopters are most suited to perform CAS while their employment in interdiction is problematic at best. Doctrine, tactics, and threat are studied as they applied in the Soviet-Afghan War, Desert Storm, and OIF in order to examine the issue across a range of time and types of warfare.

This study offers a Lacanian-informed analysis of the rhetorical shifts, significant absences and elisions in the Bush administration’s justificatory war rhetoric prior to, during, and after the 2003 Iraq War. Lacan’s conception of the Subject, I suggest, is indispensable for the study of how ideology succeeds and fails rhetorically to avoid traumatic kernels, inconvenient facts, unspeakable historical truths, voids, etc. This project presents an opportunity to re-examine rhetorical studies’ assumptions about the emergence of subjectivity, including the process of interpellation, in ways that allow us to theorize not only the constitution but also the failure of identity. In so doing, it revisits the question of agency and calls for an increased focus on desire in matters rhetorical. Finally, the study invites reconsideration of the relation between rhetoric and time by suggesting that a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality can enrich and expand the existing scholarship.

This thesis explores Shi’a-Sunni relations in Gulf politics during a period of regional upheaval, starting with the 2003 invasion of Iraq through the Arab revolts of early 2011. It seeks to understand the conditions under which sectarian distinctions become a prominent feature of the Gulf political landscape, focusing on the three Gulf countries that have been affected most by sectarian tensions: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. The study analyzes the contagion effect of the civil war in Iraq, the 2006 war in Lebanon, and the Arab Spring on local sectarian dynamics in the three states. Specifically, it explores the role of domestic institutions—parliaments and other quasi-democratic structures, the media, and clerical establishments—in tempering or exacerbating sectarianism. It finds that the maturity and strength of participatory institutions in each state played a determinant role in the level of sectarianism resulting from dramatic shifts in the regional environment since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I conclude, therefore, that the real roots of the so-called “rise of the Shi’a” phenomena lie in the domestic political context of each state, rather than in the regional policies of Iran or the contagion effect of events in Iraq or Lebanon. Although the Gulf Shi’a took a degree of inspiration from the actions of their co-religionists in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, they ultimately strove for greater rights in a non-sectarian, nationalist framework. The rise of sectarianism in the Gulf has been largely the product of excessive alarm by entrenched Sunni elites or the result of calculated attempts by regimes to discredit Shi’a political actors by portraying them as proxies for Iran, Iraq, or the Lebanese Hizballah. What is qualitatively different about the post-2003 period is not the level of mobilization by the Shi’a, but rather the intensity of threat perception by Gulf regimes and Sunni Islamists.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T18:24:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 28 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / o presente trabalho investiga o fotojornalismo independente produzido durante a Guerra do Iraque (2003), ao tomar como objeto de análise o livro de fotografia Unembedded: four independent photojournalists on the war in Iraq (2005). O objetivo central dessa investigação é entender o que um livro de fotografias pode endereçar ao leitor justamente num conflito que recebeu uma extensa cobertura jornalística em outros meios de comunicação. O desenvolvimento da pesquisa está centrado em três abordagens: a examinação do livro de fotografia enquanto um processo comunicacional (uma prática fotojornalística diferenciada), a observação dos fotojornalistas independentes durante a guerra e uma análise específica do discurso do livro Unembedded. O estudo está ancorado teórica e metodologicamente em quatro autores centrais: a Semiótica de Roland Barthes e Umberto Eco acerca da fotografia e do signo visual; as abordagens do discurso fotojornalístico de John Tagg (estabelecidas a partir de uma leitura de Michel Foucault); e o / this work investigates the independent photojournalism produced during Iraq War (2003), taking as objects of analysis the photographic book Unembedded: four independent photojournalists on the war in Iraq (2005). The main objective of this investigation is understood what a book can address to a reader in a war that received a huge coverage in the mainstream media. The progress of the research is based in three ways: the examination of the photographic book while a communicative process (a specific practice in photojournalism), an examination of the independent correspondents during the war and a specific analysis of the book’s discourse. The study is theoretically and methodologically based in four central authors: the Semiotics studies of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco about the photography and the visual communication; the analysis of the photojournalism in John Tagg (establish through the Michel Foucault’s perspective); and the studies about Sociology of Violence in John Keane. It realized that the book U

Over the past decade British troops have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of what was previously called the 'war on terror'. During this period reports have emerged of British soldiers engaging in sexual abuse against local detainees, the killing of innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and the use of banned techniques during interrogations. At the same time, widely televised repatriations of dead and injured soldiers have taken place, and a combination of the proliferation in use of improvised explosive devices by enemy forces and improvements in battlefield medicine has meant increasing numbers of soldiers are returning home with limbs missing and permanent disfigurement. It is unpacking how these specific acts of wartime violence have become possible that this thesis is concerned with. Specifically, this project will ask questions about the relation between contemporary constructions of British militarised masculinity - what I call a 'liberal warrior' - and the enactment of wartime violence. At its core, this thesis will argue that a liberal warrior subjectivity will never be stable or 'complete', and that it is in its precariousness and attempts at stabilisation that specific militarised violences become possible. Building on a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities and appropriating Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I detail a way of conceptualising a militarised masculine liberal warrior that avoids mapping 'hard' and 'fixed' borders. Constituted through gendered discourses and hierarchical gendered binaries, boundaries are marked around a liberal warrior that excludes traits and characteristics a liberal warrior is not. However, those traits and characteristics that a liberal warrior has attempted to expel remain an integral constituting part of what is included, haunting the subjectivity, and destabilising its attempts at coherent representation. I argue it is through the appearances of ghosts - the concrete materialisation of an aspect of a haunting - that notice can be given to the ever-presence of hauntings. Focusing specifically on attempts at expelling - exorcising - hauntings of (homo)sexual potential, uncontrollability, colonial desires and fears, and the brutality of warfare in the (re)construction of a liberal warrior, the thesis pays attention to the materialisations of ghosts across multiple sites, including basic training, barrack living and during a tour of duty. Emerging as the banal and mundane, and also as spectacular wartime violence, recognising these materialisations as ghosts has several effects. It draws attention to the (im)possibility of a liberal warrior and always already haunting presences, it allows the conceptual space between everyday soldiering 'doings' and the spectacularly violent to be bridged, and it reveals the ways in which attempts at expelling hauntings and (re)articulating the borders of a liberal warrior makes these (sometimes violent) appearances of ghosts possible.

Iranians who were marginalized by Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamicization of the 1979 Iranian Revolution nevertheless fought for Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). This has been ignored in popular discourse and academic scholarship. But leaving out the historical willingness of people from across the political and religious spectrums to die in the “Sacred Defense” has left us misunderstanding Iranian nationalism. In this dissertation, I argue that the willingness of “secular” Iranians to sacrifice for Iran results from internal conflicts over the sacred Iran, and the concomitant sacrifices, that occurred in the four preceding decades. I demonstrate that during this period religion and sacrificial rhetoric and imagery were intrinsic to groups across the political spectrum and not just to the political right (e.g., Khomeini), as existing research has it. Civil society engaged in a transformative discourse about Iran not just as a country or homeland (vatan) but as the sacred (moqadas) necessitating sacrifice (feda kardan). The deployment of writings, speeches, and images of Iran as sacred at the time of the Allied Forces Invasion in 1941 became politically ubiquitous by 1953. The battle between the Shah and the Liberal-Left being waged at this time was an ideological and physical contestation of each’s vision for their distinct, future, sacred Iran. By re-contextualizing both sides as utopian ideologues, I change the historical narrative to show an entrenched, continuous confrontation in the subsequent decades before the Iran-Iraq War over divergent, idealized notions of the nation-state. This period of “sacrificial creationism,” as I describe it, over contending visions of the sacred produced “the nation” and identified its people as “nationals” beyond the conceptualization of social and political elites who advanced an official state nationalism. This sacrificial creationism generated the charged sentiment and popular participation that united Iranians against the Iraqi invasion, a unity that crossed political and religious affiliations to include Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Fedayeen-e Khalq. Now, just like other nation-states, Iran became the higher, meaning-making entity—the sacred—that transcends individual interests.

This thesis seeks to identify the main sources of news in the coverage of the 2003 war in Iraq by the Arab channel Al-Jazeera and CNN. It distinguishes the news sources that journalists of CNN and Al-Jazeera have depended on while covering or reporting the events of the war and examines why they gave more airtime to certain news sources than others. Content analysis is used as the main research method and the Glasgow University Media Group's work is adopted as a model. The data for the research is five prime time news hours chosen from five-day intervals during the war from the coverage by both channels.This study also examines the two channels' different perspectives towards the event. This takes into account their histories, their stated position regarding their role and their editorial practices. At the same time there will be an attempt to further contextualize this issue by looking at the flow of the world news across borders, the development of Arab media before and after the emergence of satellite broadcasting and by briefly reviewing the history of Western media war reportage.The thesis concludes that the main sources on CNN were the 'coalition' military and official sources. By contrast, Al-Jazeera's coverage gave almost equal time to other perspectives such as anti-war voices and 'independent' analysts. Consequently it is argued that Al-Jazeera's coverage was more balanced and multiperspectival.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Mary E. Stuckey, committee chair; Michael Binford, James Dearsey, David Cheshier, Carol K. Winkler, committee members. Electronic text (287 p.). Description based on contents viewed Apr. 26, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 262-287).

In this issue, we continue and complete the debate on the future of the transatlantic relationship and of world order after the Iraq war. The debate was initiated by an article by Thomas Risse (Freie Universität Berlin) in WeltTrends 39, which has provoked a remarkable reaction within the German academic community, as documented in WeltTrends 40. This issue features additional comments and the rebuttal by Thomas Risse. <br>Most authors believe that the transatlantic partnership is in a serious crisis, but claim that it remains without an alternative for both sides of the Atlantic.

In this issue, we continue and complete the debate on the future of the transatlantic relationship and of world order after the Iraq war. The debate was initiated by an article by Thomas Risse (Freie Universität Berlin) in WeltTrends 39, which has provoked a remarkable reaction within the German academic community, as documented in WeltTrends 40. This issue features additional comments and the rebuttal by Thomas Risse. <br>Most authors believe that the transatlantic partnership is in a serious crisis, but claim that it remains without an alternative for both sides of the Atlantic.