scholarly journals David Hare’s Stuff Happens a Dramatic Journey of American War on Iraq

Author(s):  
Elaff Ganim Salih ◽  
Hardev Kaur ◽  
Mohamad Fleih Hassan

The war launched by America and its allies against the country of Iraq on 2003 was a debatable and notorious war for the public opinion was shocked with the realization that the reasons for launching the war under the title ‘Iraq’s Mass Destruction Weapons’ were false. The tragic consequences of this war led many writers around the world to question the policy of the United States and its manipulation of facts to justify their narratives. The present study examines the American policy of invading Iraq in David Hare’s Stuff Happens. It investigates Hare’s technique of combining documentary realism with imaginative reconstruction of the arguments to dramatize the American Invasion of Iraq. Stuff Happens is a historical and political play written as a verbatim theatre. It depicts the backroom deals and political maneuvers of the Bush administration in justifying their campaign against the ‘Axis of Evil’ culminated by the war against Iraq. The verbatim theatre is the best way of showing the gap between ‘what is said and what is seen to be done’. Scenes of direct speeches by real characters are part of this theatre dramatized to present a new reading of a historical event. In addition, characterization is used by Hare’s to chronicle the American war on Iraq. The study follows a postcolonial framework. The study concludes that Hare’s Stuff Happens succeeded in shaking the public opinion with the truth that Bush’s administration has manipulated facts in order to achieve their colonial and imperial interests in Iraq, which led to more destruction and violence in this country.

Author(s):  
Przemysław Potocki

The article is based on an analysis of certain aspects of how the public opinion of selected nations in years 2001–2016 perceived the American foreign policy and the images of two Presidents of the United States (George W. Bush, Barack Obama). In order to achieve these research goals some polling indicators were constructed. They are linked with empirical assessments related to the foreign policy of the U.S. and the political activity of two Presidents of the United States of America which are constructed by nations in three segments of the world system. Results of the analysis confirmed the research hypotheses. The position of a given nation in the structure of the world system influenced the dynamics of perception and the directions of empirical assessments (positive/negative) of that nation’s public opinion about the USA.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Montgomery

AbstractShortly following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an American mobile exploitation team was diverted from its mission in hunting for weapons for mass destruction to search for an ancient Talmud in the basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police (Mukhabarat) headquarters in Baghdad. Instead of finding the ancient holy book, the soldiers rescued from the basement flooded with several feet of fetid water an invaluable archive of disparate individual and communal documents and books relating to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. The seizure of Jewish cultural materials by the Mukhabarat recalled similar looting by the Nazis during World War II. The materials were spirited out of Iraq to the United States with a vague assurance of their return after being restored. Several years after their arrival in the United States for conservation, the Iraqi Jewish archive has become contested cultural property between Jewish groups and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora on the one hand and Iraqi cultural officials on the other. This article argues that the archive comprises the cultural property and heritage of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora.


Author(s):  
Scott Lucas

President Eisenhower easily swept to victory in 1956, defeating Adlai Stevenson, whom he had also beaten in 1952, despite crises and wars that had suddenly flared in Hungary and Egypt. When the events of 1956 are examined through public and private records, the president’s response to these crises appears to confirm his claim that he would not allow policy making to be hostage to the wishes of the public. Instead, he made clear time and again that he would proceed with what he thought was the “right” course for US interests, irrespective of the American public’s reaction to the policy or to his reelection campaign. At the same time, he was ready to invoke public opinion in the United States and throughout the world to try and bend other statesmen to his will.


Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Schwaeble ◽  
Jody Sundt

The United States is unique in its reliance on incarceration. In 2018 the United States had the largest prison population in the world—more than 2.1 million people—and incarcerated 655 per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. public also holds more punitive attitudes in comparison to citizens of other Western, developed countries. For example, when presented with the same description about a hypothetical criminal event, Americans consistently prefer longer sentences compared to residents of other countries. Attitudes about the death penalty are also instructive. Although international support for the death penalty has declined dramatically over time, the majority of Americans are still in favor of capital punishment for certain crimes. In comparison, Great Britain abolished the death penalty in 1965, and only 45% of its citizens continue to support capital punishment. This raises an important question: Can understanding the will of the public help explain how governments respond to crime? The answer to this question is more complicated than expected upon first consideration. The United States generally starts from a more punitive stance than other countries, in part because it experiences more violent crime but also because Americans hold different moral and cultural views about crime and punishment. U.S. public officials, including lawmakers, judges, and prosecutors, are responsive to trends in public attitudes. When the public mood became more punitive during the 1990s, for example, U.S. states universally increased the length of prison sentences and expanded the number of behaviors punishable by incarceration. Similarly, the public mood moderated in the United States toward the end of the 2000s, and states began reducing their prison populations and supporting sentencing reform. It is also true, however, that public officials overestimate how punitive the public is while citizens underestimate how harsh the justice system is. Moreover, the public supports alternatives to tough sentences including prevention, treatment, and alternatives to incarceration, particularly for juveniles and nonviolent offenders. Thus public opinion about punishment is multifaceted and complex, necessitating the exploration of many factors to understand it. Looking at public attitudes about punishment over time, across culture and societies, and in a variety of ways can help explain why social responses to crime change and why some people or groups of people are more punitive than others. Two ideas are helpful in organizing motivations for punishment. First, public support for punishment may be motivated by rational, instrumental interests about how best to protect public safety. Public concern about crime is a particularly important influence on trends in the public mood, but fear of crime and victimization are inconsistently related to how individuals feel about punishment. Second, attitudes about punishment are tied to expressive desires. Attitudes are influenced by culture and moral beliefs about how to respond to harm and violations of the law. Thus attitudes about punishment are relevant in understanding how the public thinks about the problem of crime, as how people think and feel about crime influences what they think and feel should be done about it.


Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha

This chapter discusses political developments in Iraq following the US and UK's military campaign in 2003. The publicly stated reason for the invasion of Iraq was Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his links with international Islamist terrorists. However, is probably more likely that from the very beginning the Bush Administration, or more precisely influential elements within it, made the removal of Saddam Husayn a central plank of the administration's policy. Whatever the reasons for the invasion, the United States found itself on April 9, 2003 the hegemonic power in Iraq, faced with the responsibilities of governance. And indeed until June 28, 2004, when sovereignty was transferred to the Iraqis, the United States (with some input by the British) ruled Iraq directly through a mostly American administration in Baghdad called the Coalition Provisional Authority.


2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Beaulier ◽  
William J. Boyes ◽  
William S. Mounts

One of John Maynard Keynes's most quoted statements (1935, p. 383) is: … the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The number of economists per capita in the United States has risen in the past few decades. At the same time, the public has become more comfortable with big government. This raises intriguing questions regarding just how economists are influencing public opinion; we are left wondering whether economists are instilling a desire in the public for more government or whether, in opposition to Keynes's statement, economists are losing influence. In this paper, we provide some answers. We find that the increased role of economists in society and in policymaking has led to an increase in favorable attitudes toward government intervention.


1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manley O. Hudson

In late 1917, when the Soviet Government of Russia published various documents from the archives of the Russian Foreign Office, an insistent demand was created throughout the world for the abolition of secret diplomacy. A volume of secret treaties was published in England in 1917 and in the United States in early 1918, and the consequent reaction of public opinion greatly influenced the current statements of the aims of the belligerents. In his address of January 8, 1918, President Wilson put the subject of secret diplomacy at the forefront in the “program of the world's peace” embodied in the Fourteen Points: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always openly and in the public view.” It has since developed that these words may have been written without a knowledge of the contents of the secret treaties made by Allied Powers during the war; but they were largely responsible for the crystallization of the revulsion which followed the publication of the secret treaties into a determination that the end of the war should signalize the beginning of a new era in the conduct of international relations.


Author(s):  
Paul J. Halyard

Amusement parks have increased in popularity around the world, with attendance escalating to more than 15 million people each year. In addition to the United States, Japan and European countries are currently developing parks, featuring amusement rides and water slides. Today, I will discuss the design and maintenance criteria of amusement park rides and waterpark slides, as well as the protection by the authority with local jurisdiction of the public from construction to operation. I will also cite typical cases which reinforce the need for requirements and standards,


Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.


Traditio ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 391-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brückmann

The importance of the manuscript pontificals for the study of the medieval evolution of the Latin liturgy needs no reaffirmation here. The state of the published descriptions and classifications of these manuscripts, however, is not commensurate in all cases with what their importance would lead one to expect.Ehrensberger has provided a full description of the manuscript pontificasl preserved in the Vatican Library; although this is no longer recent, it is invaluable in the absence of a complete catalogue of the Vatican manuscripts. The monumental work of Leroquais describes in detail the manuscript pontificals extant in the public libraries in France; as most of the pontificals in France appear to be in public libraries, this work is fairly comprehensive in its coverage. Dom Anselm Strittmatter has listed and classified the liturgical manuscripts preserved in the United States. For pontificals in other countries, however, there exist no such reference works. Professor Richard Kay of the University of Kansas is currently compiling a handlist in which all the manuscript pontificals extant throughout the world will be cited and briefly identified, but not fully described. Until this appears, anyone working on pontificals or on ordines normally included in pontificals will quite likely have to work systematically through innumerable catalogues of manuscript collections to cover every library, city by city, for a frequently minimal return.


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