American Wars In Iraq Research Articles

Picturing American War on Iraq: A Visual Discourse Analysis of Decoding ‘Death’ in the Photojournalist’s Lenses

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite (James Nachtwey) (https://www.quotes.net/mquote/102671) Death, though certain, is horrible and scary when it comes to the fact that it is due to war and armed conflict for decades in a spot like Iraq. People relate war to history through photography (Topba?, 2011). The current paper fundamentally is a portal to mirroring the photojournalist’s shots in making meaning of death by letting the audience read what is unspeakable in photos. Basically, a collection of (19) photos captured by three World Press Prizes winners, photojournalists – Lynsey Addario, Adam Ferguson, and Ivor Prickett – (among others) – were analysed,, focusing on their galleries of photos and the media on the the American war in Iraq. Doing visual discourse analysis in photos, though of different war eras in Iraq, and a semiotic approach is radically adopted in the analytical part to break the code of Death in the selected photos. Icons and symbols are potentially workable clues for thematizing non-physical death in a place of the world which is devastated thoroughly. It is the bombarded questions on which the current study is based: (1) How could the abstract death be approached linguistically in war photography? (2) Is it the shot that nearly kills the photojournalist being in the front line making them feel a momentum death as the casualties? (3) Is the photojournalist’s role in war an eyewitness of the casualties’ physical bloody death or there could be other hidden deaths that are decoded in the shots?, and (4) Are the camera’s shots reliable enough to speak the messages on death in wartime? The study transpired a variety of deaths in the iconic and symbolic shots of the American war in Iraq. Other academic shots for future works on visual discourse, I remain capturing.

Formation: A Woman's Memoir of Rape, Rage, and War by Ryan Leigh Dostie

Reviewed by: Formation: A Woman's Memoir of Rape, Rage, and War by Ryan Leigh Dostie Bettina Hindes (bio) formation: a woman's memoir of rape, rage, and war Ryan Leigh Dostie Grand Central Publishing https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/ryan-leigh-dostie/formation/9781538731529/ 368 pages; Print, $17.99 To be a soldier at war produces a harrowing tale, albeit one that has been told many times. The story of war, often related by men, is as old as human culture itself. In the period covering the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an admirable body of veteran memoirs has been appearing. Brian Turner poetically contributed his book on Iraq, My Life as a Foreign Country, Adrian Bonenberger's Afghan Post uses the epistolary form, and Un-American, by Erik Edstrom, employs a sociocritical, almost academic style to depict the disillusionment of a generation of US soldiers. These are just a few of many such moving and commendable books by veterans of the era. Fewer stories have been told by women, however, despite women serving in the military and deploying in ever greater numbers. To be a woman soldier at war is, of course, part of being a woman in the military. To be a woman in the modern, barely post-gender-integration American military, is where being a woman still remains the defining characteristic of the story. Men tell tales of being soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, whereas women tell of being seen only as women. To be a woman in the military was and often continues to be a liability. Almost every book by a woman veteran recounts sexual assault and covers the spectrum from constant discrimination and harassment to rape, suicide, and murder. One such book is Formation, by Ryan Leigh Dostie. A bright-eyed young religious woman, she enlists in the US Army right out of high school shortly before 9/11 and becomes a Persian-Farsi linguist. Her memoir is not just a story of how a woman can do as well as a man in the military, but reveals in painful, riveting detail and beautiful prose how much more difficult this job is made by military sexual trauma and the bungled response to it by an Army that was willfully ill-equipped to deal with such rampant abuse. [End Page 34] Although women have always played a role in war, official integration into the various branches of the US defense forces has been slow. Despite having served in World War II, it wasn't until the 1970s that women began to be admitted to the service academies, until today we have the highest numbers of women ever in the military. Their representation ranges from 8 percent of Marine Corps to 15 percent of Army and 19 percent of Air Force members. Integration became the task of individual women in a military composed of men who often didn't want them there and didn't always know how to deal with them when they were. The female veteran memoir in the era of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars arguably began with Love My Rifle More Than You (2005), by Kayla Williams, about her 2003 deployment to Iraq. The book provided a raw and direct view into the life of a woman who does her job in a war zone as "just one of the guys" and accomplished as much as if not more than her male counterparts. The book is full of drinking, carousing, and pre-enlightenment gender-integration experiences. Williams had to contend with the constant sexual advances, harassment, and a sexually charged environment of her male peers while forward-deployed on a remote mountaintop. Her story reveals the many tasks of integration and just how much of the burden falls on the women to become like the men who represent the dominant culture. Other memoirs also demonstrate that women can do it, such as Shoot Like a Girl, by helicopter pilot Mary Jennings Hegar, who was shot down in Afghanistan. Hegar was later party to the class-action suit against the secretary of defense, which led to the lifting of the ban on women in combat in 2013. All these memoirs show...

Theatrical Responses to the American War in Iraq: A Study in Things Happen by David Hare

وصفت الدراما الحربية المعاصرة بأنها رد فعل على المعاناة العميقة التي نشأت عن الحرب التي، لسوء الحظ، أصبحت أللغة العليا للاتصال في العصر الحديث. وبالتالي، فإن المسرح السياسي الانكليزي المعاصر قد أظهر ترابطا فريدا بين الدراما والسياسة: فالاهتمام بالحرب بين الولايات المتحدة والعراق ليس استثناء في الواقع. الكاتب المسرحي البريطاني، ديفيد هير، ينتمي إلى اتجاه الدراما الحربية التي تمكن العالم من رؤية الحقيقة والصدمة والعنف في الحرب الأمريكية في العراق. الأشياء تحدث تساعد وبمهارة لتبين كيف أن الولايات المتحدة وظفت الدبلوماسية القسرية لتلاعب الدول الأخرى لتحقيق المذهب الجديد : "القرن الأمريكي الجديد". في الأشياء تحدث، هير يتوثق تاريخ العراق المأساوي الأخير في مثل هذا النهج الذي يمزج الفيلم الوثائقي مع الخيالية لعرض الأحداث من عام 2000، حتى الغزو الفعلي للعراق في آذار 2003. المسرحية تتبع أصول الحرب الأمريكية في العراق وتكشف النقاب عن كل المحاولات والإجراءات التي اتخذها بوش وفريق أدارته لغزو العراق. وتركز هذه الدراسة بشكل رئيسي على عنصر القوة الذي يميز دوافع القادة الأمريكيين والسعي المتواصل للسلطة. أن الاشياء تحدث لهير، ومع ذلك، تضع سياقه لإستراتيجية بوش القسرية فيما يتعلق بالعراق، فضلا عن التلاعب به من الأمم المتحدة، بلير، باول، وشخصيات أخرى للمساعدة في تحقيق أهدافه.

An Overview of American War in Iraq and Postcolonial Ecocritical Approach in Turner's and Mikhail's Works

paper makes a postcolonial ecocritical comparison between Brian Turner's and Dunya Mikhail's books,Here, Bullet, Phantom Noise, Iraqi Nights, A Diary of a Wave outside the Sea, In Her feminine Sign and War Works after the 2003 American War in Iraq. Their works emphasize the linkage between the ecological decay and the social decadence of the Iraqi society. Both Turner and Mikhail confirm the interrelatedness between the ecological destruction and the eradication of Iraqis' culture and identity. They present the truthful images of the imperial actions that have led to the environmental deterioration in Iraq in many of their poems, such as Caravan, The Hurt Locker, The Mutanabii Street Bombing, Kirkuk Oilfield, 1927, The Baghdad Zoo, The War Works Hard, Innana, America, An Urgent Call and many others.

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Brian Turner

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Brian Turner

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Dunya Mikhail Dr. Sherif Abdulhameed Hamed Bahooty

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Dunya Mikhail Dr. Sherif Abdulhameed Hamed Bahooty

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Dunya Mikhail. Dr. Sherif Abdulhameed Hamed Bahooty

American War in Iraq: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Selected Poems by Dunya Mikhail. Dr. Sherif Abdulhameed Hamed Bahooty

Survival Psychology in Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds

After experiencing the American war in Iraq as a machine gunner in the U.S. Army, Kevin Powers deliberates on war and the risks surrounding the lives of all those involved in his debut novel, The Yellow Birds . This paper aims to uncover the survival psychology that underlies the behaviour of the two main characters in the novel, Private John Bartle and Private Daniel Murphy as well as other minor characters. Survival psychology expounds unpredictable and threatening situations where people’s lives are at stake. They either choose to fight, flight or freeze in reaction to these horrible experiences, that is, they either take action, surrender or eventually die. In the context of war, soldiers frequently face such deadly situations. The reactions of the characters to the circumstances of war and their success and/or failure to cope with its dangers are indicative of their survival mechanism. The novel is examined according to the three major periods of impact in survival psychology, specifically, pre-impact, impact and post-impact periods. Bartle overcomes the psychological consequences of his war experience years after leaving the army, but Murphy loses his faculties in the chasms of war and consequently dies. The psychological survival of those who overcome these risks physically is not guaranteed. Such terrifying experiences of death may make these people vulnerable and exposed to psychological repercussions such as psychosis.

Freedom to Struggle: The Ironies of Colson Whitehead

This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead. I begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing. I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016). I argue that in Apex—published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Whitehead treats freedom ironically. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture—particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for African Americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction.

Finding Belief Systems in Modern War Movies: An Analysis of the Film The Messenger Through the Lens of the American Civil Religion

Films are a way to communicate the human experience, sometimes uniquely representing the current mood of a populace or political movement of the time. This research explores how the film The Messenger, released during the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, portrayed the religious and spiritual elements of American society and the experience of the soldier during wartime. It did this by employing a study of dialogue, signs, and symbols popularized by scholar Robert Bellah and his theory of the American Civil Religion. This article explores how both overt and embedded messages of religion and spirituality are intrinsically tied with the American military experience.

The Rising Shi’a Crescent: Iranian Smart Power and Implications for the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf

The circumstances of the American war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the international fight against Da’esh have provided an opportunity for the Islamic Republic of Iran to consolidate its power in the Middle East, as foretold by King Abdullah II of Jordan in his coining of the phrase “Shi’a crescent” in 2004. Iran’s successful resurgence can be attributed to its effective use of “smart power,” or the combination of soft and hard power tactics. Iran’s hard power, in the form of Shi’a militias and proxies, is supported with soft power tactics. These include Iran’s export of the ideals of the Revolution and its model of an Islamic Republic, its role as leader of the global Shi’ite community, and its investment in cultural diplomacy across the Middle East as well as its renewed engagement with the West.

Thinking in Butler

Thinking in Butler

Scientific Cooperation: The Way Out for the United States Of America in a World of Interdependancy

Since the 1990s, the term has become increasingly popular as an alternative to hard power, but also the term has been considered as controversial and inapplicable by many scholars. The aim of this paper is to prove that soft power is an effective mechanism for any state to realize its ends, while hard power will only lead to more tension and hatred among states and nations. Furthermore, it cannot makes a country's goals come true in a world of interdependency. In this regard, this paper will answer two important questions. Firstly, did the U.S. achieve its goals or even change the behavior of certain countries or terrorist groups through the use of hard power? Secondly, did the U.S. achieve its goals through the use of scientific cooperation as a means of soft power when dealing with the former USSR? To answer those two questions, my arguments depend on empirical examples, such as the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the stick and carrot policy against Iran and Sudan. All these sorts of hard power proved to be useless. Although U.S tends to be the only super military power in a unipolar world, in reality the distribution of power resources in the contemporary information age varies greatly across different issues, such as the interstate economic issues, whereby the world has become multipolar. In addition to that, the transitional issues; such as climate change, war against terrorism, and spread of infectious diseases power isn’t dominated by any superpowers; but it is rather widely distributed and chaotically organized among states; so it makes no sense to call this a unipolar world. Therefore, the U.S. is not powerful enough to achieve its goals in the countries mentioned above, if it continues to use hard power. Even worse, the U.S. reputation was damaged as a result of these wars and became abhorrent. In the case of Iran and Sudan, neither economic sanctions nor political hostility helped the U.S. to achieve its aims to topple or change the attitude of those regimes.

Eyeless in America

This article examines 50 films produced and released between the years 2001 and 2012 that are concerned with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using Jacques Ellul’s theories set out in his book Propaganda, the article argues that while the films have failed at the box office, they were intended to function as integration propaganda. The article proposes six different tropes or common frames for understanding how the films avoid dealing with problems raised by the wars. Why the films failed, and what functioned as integration propaganda instead, is the subject for a second article titled “Eyeless in America, the Sequel.”

'Allied masculinities' and the absent presences of the other: recuperation of Japanese soldiers in the age of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: an analysis of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima

'Allied masculinities' and the absent presences of the other: recuperation of Japanese soldiers in the age of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: an analysis of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima

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.

Totalitarianism Revisited

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America such as Paul Berman, André Glucksmann, Richard Herzinger, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, as well as Nobel Peace Prize recipient José Ramos-Horta justified, if not military intervention, then an aggressive and principled policy toward Saddam Hussein's regime—largely on liberal-humanitarian grounds, invoking the imperative of resisting totalitarianism. Though he explicitly opposed the unilateral use of military force, Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a "third totalitarianism"—after Nazism and communism—"as the major challenge facing the international community in the twenty-first century." In December 2004, in "An Argument for a New Liberalism, a Fighting Faith," Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained that "three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not been fundamentally reshaped by the experience." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called terrorism the "new totalitarianism," the world's greatest threat to democracy. The return of this term is instructive, because its history is not at all as luminescent as its advocates would have us believe.

Hearts and Minds: Military Recruitment and the High School Battlefield

IN HER BOOK Purple Hearts, the documentary photographer Nina Berman presents 40 photographs--two each of 20 U.S. veterans of the American war in Iraq--plus a couple of accompanying paragraphs of commentary from each vet in his or her own words. (1) Their comments cohere around their service, their sacrifice, their suffering. Purple Heart binds them together--this award is their common experience, this distinction is what embrace and what embraces them. This is what live with. Their views on war, on their time in arms, on where hope are headed with their lives, are various; their ways of making sense about the U.S. military mission, wildly divergent. Josh Olson, 24 years old, begins: We bent over backwards for these people, ended up screwing us over, stabbing us in the back. A lot of them, mean, they're going to have to be killed.... As Americans we've taken it upon ourselves to almost cure the world's problems guess, give everybody else a chance. guess that's how we're good-hearted.... He's missing his right leg now and was presented with his Purple Heart at Walter Reed Military Hospital by President Bush himself. He feels it all--pride, anger, loss. Jermaine Lewis, 23, describes growing up in a Chicago neighborhood where has always been around. He describes training as a place where they break you down and then try to build you up. To him, the reasons for going to war were bogus, we were right to go in vets are all young, and several recall deciding to enlist when were much younger still, more innocent, more vulnerable, feeling somehow invincible. Jermaine Lewis says: I've been dealing with the military since was a sophomore in high school. They came to the school like six times a year, all military branches. They had a recruiting station like a block from our high school. It was just right Tyson Johnson III, 22, wanted to get away from the poverty and death he saw all around him. His life was going nowhere, he thought, and so he signed on: And here am, back here ... don't know where it's going to end up. Joseph Mosner enrolled when he was 19. There was nothing out there, he writes. There was no good jobs so figured this would have been a good thing. Frederick Allen thought going to war would be jumping out of planes. He joined up when recruiters came to his high school. I thought it would be fun. Adam Zaremba, 20, also enlisted while still in high school: The recruiter called the house, he was actually looking for my brother and he happened to get me. think it was because didn't want to do homework for a while, and then don't know, you get to wear a cool uniform. It just went on from there. still don't even understand a lot about the Army. Purple Heart seemed like a good thing from a distance, but then when it happens you realize that you have to do something, or something has to happen to you in order to get it. RECRUITING HIGH-SCHOOLERS Military recruiting in high schools has been a mainstay of the so-called all-volunteer armed forces from the start. High school kids are at an age when being a member of an identifiable group with a grand mission and a shared spirit--and never underestimate a distinctive uniform--is of exaggerated importance, something gang recruiters in big cities also note with interest and exploit with skill. Kathy Dobie, quoting a military historian, notes that basic training has been essentially the same in every army in every age, because it works with the same raw material that's always been there in teenage boys: a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolute desperate desire to fit in. (2) Being cool and going along with the crowd are big things. Add the need to prove oneself to be a macho, strong, tough, capable person, combined with an unrealistic calculus of vulnerability and a constricted sense of options specifically in poor and working-class communities--all of this creates the toxic mix in a young person's head that can be a military recruiter's dream. …