Conquering the minds, conquering Iraq: The social production of misinformation in the United States - a case study

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration rallied the American public for war via claims that they held unassailable evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and through the insinuation that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda, and Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks. Despite the introduction of compelling evidence that these claims were false, more than 18 months after the official end of the war half of the American population continued to believe that either weapons of mass destruction had been found or that Iraq possessed a developed program for creating them. The prevalence of these misperceptions suggests important questions: How and why could such a significant percentage of the population remain so misinformed? What was the social process leading to the widespread adoption of misinformation? And what were the political effects of these misperceptions? This article proposes an analytical model that outlines both the production of these misperceptions and their political ramifications. It argues that the misperceptions about the Iraq war were socially produced via a complex interaction between a variety of factors including: the general climate of fear in America in the post-9/11 era, Bush administration agenda-setting strategies, and brokering between the political and communication establishments.     

Social-psychology and the invasion of Iraq

Abstract

The invasion of Iraq by American and British forces is analyzed from the standpoint of social psychology. The following social phenomena and events are discussed: (a) the role of groupthink in the intelligence failure; (b) asymmetrical consequences of reward and punishment and the role of causal attribution in responsibility assignment as explanations for the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by Iraq;(c) dissonance avoidance and the refusal by those responsible for the invasion to accept that there were no WMD in Iraq; (d) balance theory, retributive justice and the attempt to link Saddam to bin Laden after the acceptance of the inexistence of WMD; (e) de-individuation, power of the situation, and obedience to authority and the Abu-Ghraib tortures; (f) the escalation of violence and the psychology of malignant social processes. The paper ends with a distinction between science and applications of science, and gives some recommendations to achieve peace in the world based on social psychological knowledge.     

海湾地区“什叶派新月带”兴起的宗教政治影响

伊拉克战争推翻萨达姆政权造成的一个最重要结果就是,解除了伊拉克对伊朗什叶派神权政府的多年遏制,还使得伊拉克什叶派在战后政治重建中逐步占据了政治主导地位。随着伊朗什叶派政权和伊拉克什叶派势力的联系日益加强,他们已在海湾地区形成了一股强大的什叶派宗教政治势力。在其影响下,周边其他逊尼派国家内部的什叶派民众纷纷要求扩大政治权力,逊尼派君主制国家政府也感到了什叶派神权思想反对君主制度的严峻压力。目前,正在日益兴起并标志着伊朗伊斯兰革命第二阶段的“什叶派新月带”,已经改变了海湾地区什叶派长期遭受逊尼派压制的传统局面,并直接关系到拥有世界最大石油资源的海湾地区的安全秩序和政治前景。     

Undergraduate Social Work Faculty in the USA React to the War with Iraq

The role of social workers in political activism has been characterized with ambivalence, and few studies have addressed political activism within the social work academic setting. The purpose of the current study was to explore how social work educators responded to the war with Iraq from an educational perspective as well as a personal perspective. Undergraduate social work faculty (N = 65) from accredited social work programs in each state throughout the USA completed a brief quantitative survey via email about the war with Iraq including the following topics: educational responses; personal responses; personal views; academic freedom; and demographic data. Findings revealed that 70% of respondents felt that social work faculty had a responsibility to educate students about the war with Iraq, however, only 36% of respondents felt that social work faculty had a responsibility to advocate for or against the war with Iraq. The majority of the faculty surveyed incorporated the war with Iraq in their class activities (88%) and participated in war activities outside of class on their own campus (80%). A significant minority of faculty felt restricted by their institution from expressing their views of the war with Iraq during class time (14%) and on their own campus (17%).     

A POSITIVE THEORY OF DISCRETIONARY POLICY, THE COST OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT AND THE BENEFITS OF A CONSTITUTION

We offer an explanation of government's preference for discretionary policy action. The main elements are asymmetric information and the ability and desire of governments to maximize reelection prospects. Discretionary policy imposes a social cost. We show that the cost is eliminated if all voters have the same information as the government. An optimal, state contingent policy rule that precommits government through a constitution eliminates the cost by removing government's opportunities to exploit its informational advantage. Rules of this kind, and constitutional restrictions, are difficult to enforce in the presence of uncertainty and different information available to government and the public.     

WAR PROGRAMMING: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War

The invasion of Iraq was justified to the American people by a sophisticated propaganda campaign that reflected a think tank's vision for a new foreign policy. One objective of this article is to set forth a theoretical argument for analyzing modern propaganda campaigns as a feature of mass-mediated discourse crafted by think tanks and highly organized claims makers. We propose that the current structure of policy and critique is now institutionalized and formatted as War Programming, which connects criticism within a narrative sequence, including critiques and reflections about journalistic failings. The scope of the action is so immense that it precludes and preempts its critique. The second objective is to show how the rationale for the invasion was developed as a "public conspiracy" over a decade by the members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The third aim of this article is to describe and clarify why the PNAC plans for Iraq and an imperialist foreign policy received very little news media coverage. Qualitative content analysis of news materials suggests that the news sources and media shared a logic and perspective about "timely and entertaining news." The PNAC plan was not publicized by the major news media because it fell outside the focus of the Bush administration's propaganda campaign to demonize Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, who was held to be responsible for attacks on the United States. The implications of such a well-organized propaganda campaign for future news coverage of war are discussed.     

Strategic Role Taking and Political Struggle: Bearing Witness to the Iraq War

U.S. and Canadian peace activists traveled to Iraq as a social movement tactic, in the buildup to the war and during the war itself, in an attempt to sustain or increase peace activism at home. Based on interviews with fourteen peace activists, this study analyzes how the presence of antiwar activists in Iraq serves two social movement goals. First, their presence in Iraq bestowed activists increased access to media, bolstering their ability to reframe the war within mainstream media accounts. Second, by traveling to Iraq, activists furnished themselves with stories of the hardships and suffering of war to share with audiences at home. By retelling these narratives, activists provide opportunities and obligations for audience members to imaginatively take the role of Iraqi civilians, in the hope that audience members will practice moral reasoning and be consequently moved to act against the war. To provide these role‐taking opportunities, peace activists must also engage in a political struggle over “otherhood” by countering official attempts to dehumanize Iraqis.     

Nouvelles guerres justes,nouvelles guerres saintes

Holy wars and just wars are two distinct categories regarding their justification. The first claims that God himself commands and supports war or, at least, that God is the ultimate legitimization. On this side of the world, two types of holy war have existed: the crusade and the jihad. By contrast, the just war is justified by the need to deploy an awareness of uncertainty, because that war intends to be after all a prudent decision. The challenge is to class brutality under a moral action and to place war under both the criteria of legitimacy and a less inhumane violence. Totalitarianism of the twentieth century has continued holy war, even if religions have been replaced by justificatory idéologies. Today, the wars waged on behalf of human rights and under international law, such as the war in Kosovo, may be recognized as new'holy wars' conducted on behalf of an unwavering certainty: they are of a Manichean type; while a'just war' in the contemporary context is one that belongs to a particular decision, such as the American war in Iraq, and thus submitted to the uncertainty and debate, and assuming the consequences of the decision.     

Image repair in President Bush's April 2004 news conference

As the war in Iraq heated up in March and April of 2004 and casualties continued to climb, President George W. Bush's reputation continued the downward spiral it had experienced during the past year (from 71% approval to 49%) as more and more voters questioned his policies and fitness for office. He responded to this situation by holding only his third prime time press conference on April 13, 2004.     

An inconvenient vote: Hillary Clinton's Iraq war image repair debate strategies and their implications for representative democracy

Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of four 2007–2008 Democratic presidential candidates who had voted to authorize U.S. military use in Iraq. Given her status as the front-runner, Clinton's vote, in particular, presented a public relations problem for her among primary voters who strongly opposed the war and favored its prompt end. This study analyzes Clinton's attempts in debate performances to repair her image among voters. Clinton attempted to reduce offensiveness through differentiation, attempted to evade responsibility through defeasibility, and employed qualified mortification. Clinton's strategies were rated as inconsistent and their effectiveness is questionable.     

美对伊战争目的与伊重建

美英于3月20日对伊发动了战争，5月1日，布什总统宣布在伊的“大规模战斗”已经结束。至此，美结束了其“改造”伊拉克的第一阶段行动；第二阶段的工作是重建和掌控伊拉克，从中获取丰厚的经济利益；第三阶段是在伊建立美式民主制度，作为样板供中东各国效仿。但战后，伊社会状况混乱，民不聊生，伊重建将面临诸多困难。     

Is it ever safe to vote strategically?

There are many situations in which mis-coordinated strategic voting can leave strategic voters worse off than they would have been had they not tried to strategise. We analyse the simplest of such scenarios, in which a set of strategic voters all have the same sincere preferences and all contemplate casting the same strategic vote, while all other voters are not strategic. Most mis-coordinations in this framework can be classified as instances of either strategic overshooting (too many voted strategically) or strategic undershooting (too few). If mis-coordination can result in strategic voters ending up worse off than they would have been had they all just voted sincerely, we call the strategic vote unsafe. We show that under every onto and non-dictatorial social choice rule there exist circumstances where a voter has an incentive to cast a safe strategic vote. We extend the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem by proving that every onto and non-dictatorial social choice rule can be individually manipulated by a voter casting a safe strategic vote.     

WAGE SECRECY AS A SOCIAL CONVENTION

Despite the general belie that a free flow of information enhances efficiency, social convention appears to call for secrecy regarding individuals' wages. This paper provides an explanation for this convention. We suggest that the role of wage secrecy is to reduce effective labor mobility, and thereby enhance the feasibility of risk-shifting contracts. Wage secrecy may yield a mix of mobility and risk shifting that is superior both to a spot market for labor and to a social convention that binds workers to their employers.     

The Vital Importance of Critical Listening: An Extended Example

As a means of reinforcing the importance of critical listening, this study analyzes six speeches presented by President George W. Bush. These speeches provide an extended example of the use of a rhetorical technique, associational juxtaposition, in which President Bush gives the impression of a connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by al-Qaeda when, in fact, no evidence or reasons existed to support such a connection. The paper concludes by discussing how Mr. Bush's use of associational juxtaposition underscores the need for effective critical listening.     

Elder Participation and Senior Power in Australian Electoral Politics

This article seeks to assess the “goodness of fit” between the social science literature on the impact of older voters on electoral outcomes and the Australian experience of the politics of aging. While the literature suggests that the notion of senior power is a flawed one, Australia's 2004 federal election campaign indicated that this is not quite so. This article offers a possible explanation for the difference between the literature and the Australian experience in terms of the calculus that underpinned the election campaign, namely, capturing the votes of swing voters in marginal seats including “silver” swing voters in seats with a disproportionate number of older voters. The preliminary findings of a small exploratory study of campaign strategists suggest that there may be a real basis to this explanation. Thus, there does appear to be some basis for asserting that “gray power” does play a role in Australian national electoral politics.     

The Microlevel Discourse of Social Movement Framing: Debating Antiwar Protests on a University Listserv

Abstract

Over the past two decades, researchers have increasingly employed frame analysis in attempts to understand the genesis, development, and outcomes of social movements. Relatively little attention, however, has focused on the microlevel processes involved in generating social movement frames. This paper is an effort to link theories of social movement framing with the methodology of discourse analysis. In the following, an online debate over the legitimacy of protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States provides qualitative data for a discourse analysis of microlevel framing processes. The debate occurred on a university listserv and involved more than 100 messages offered by 67 individuals over 16 days. Analyses reveal four distinct framing contests in the discourse. An initiating contest regarding a specific antiwar protest is found to generate three additional contests, the first about antiwar protests more generally, the second about the war in Iraq itself, and the third about the appropriateness of holding such a debate on a listserv sent to university employees. A framing process schema is offered to represent conflict between social movement and countermovement participants across the discourse.     

伊战对阿以和平进程的影响

美国发动的对伊战争将使阿伯世界进一步分裂与重组。战后,美国虽主导了“中东和平路线图”计划,但美并未改变其袒以压巴政策,以也未改变其对巴的强硬政策,因此,和平路线图计划将面临重重困难,中东地区很可能继续处于动荡之中,中东和平仍将路漫漫。     

Powerblindness

In the land of the blind, the one‐eyed man may be king. But positions of power may produce their own forms of blindness. This paper reviews multiple theoretical approaches to the concept of powerblindness and categorizes these literatures into five forms through which powerblindness operates: powerblind identity (failure to notice that one belongs to a privileged group), powerblind egalitarianism (belief that all groups are equal in power), powerblind hierarchy (emphasis on one's own subordinate position), powerblind exception (the claim that one is less privileged than others in one's group), and powerblind justification (belief that present‐day hierarchy is merited or inevitable). The paper identifies studies offering evidence for each, drawing on social‐psychological experiments, survey data, and qualitative research, suggesting that power and knowledge do not necessarily go hand in hand – some forms of knowledge about the social order may be more visible to people with less power than to people with more.     

伊拉克重建中国家认同之缺失

战后伊拉克教派暴力冲突不断,国家濒临内战边缘,重建深陷安全困境,折射出伊国家认同的严重缺失.伊各派势力的利益纷争、美国强力改造伊拉克、某些周边阿拉伯-伊斯兰势力的介入等内外因素导致伊重建的严重受挫.伊加强中央政府权威,美调整对伊政策,以及有关各方回到联合国框架下推动伊重建,才有可能解除伊重建中的安全困局,而重构国家认同更是伊拉克的当务之急.     

Finding the Truth in Politics: An Empirical Validation of the Epistemic Political Efficacy Concept

Self-efficacy theory suggests that one’s perceived ability to successfully find facts may motivate political information seeking. A telephone survey of voters in a presidential campaign attempted to further validate the concept of epistemic political efficacy (EPE), or belief one can discover the “truth” in politics, and applied it to modern information-seeking behaviors. This study of North Carolina registered voters (N = 605) demonstrates that EPE adds predictive power beyond commonly used measures such as individual political efficacy for contemporary media use variables like online information seeking and partisan cable viewing. EPE was a stronger positive predictor of online information seeking than individual political efficacy. In addition, viewing partisan cable shows had a stronger relationship with EPE than mainstream TV news viewing, and EPE significantly predicted MSNBC viewing, even after controlling for partisanship. In a word, voters who are high in the belief that political facts or “truths” exist take steps to find and understand them.