War on Terrorism Questions
1.1. Evaluate Jeffrey Record’s basic argument in Bounding the War on Terrorism. Is he correct or not? Why or why not?2.2. In a news item during the Bush administration, a reporter for the New York Times noted that, “From the very start of the American occupation of Iraq, at least some in the Bush administration saw an opportunity to curtail the influence of Iran’s radical Shiite leaders by producing an alternative, moderate center of Shiite Islam that would effectively neuter Tehran in ideological, political and strategic terms. This was abundantly clear to Iran’s clerical rulers, whose paramount priority since they seized power in 1979 has been to preserve their revolution and their grip on their own country.” Has this aspiration by some Bush policy-makers proven true or has some other reality developed? What does this observation say about the nature of war?3. Does the U.S. Face a Future of Never-ending Sub-national & Trans-national Violence?, Thomas Barnett states that: The post-Cold War era has witnessed an amazing “downshifting” of the source of threats to global stability. In this short span of history, the world has moved from an era in which global nuclear war was the dominant threat, through a transitional era in which it seemed that regional rogues would become the primary source of system instability, to one in which it is increasingly recognized that trans-national or non-state actors will constitute the main source of violence – sometimes of a mass nature – that has the capacity to perturb, even in a significant fashion, the functioning of the global economy. In effect, America’s definition of the threat has de-escalated from an “evil empire” to “evil regimes” to “evil actors.” What are the implications for American strategic planning based on Barnett’s assessment of the global threat environment? A proper response will include examples and references from the assigned readings in this course.4. In his assessment of the Israeli-Hezbollah War, Anthony Cordesman provided some preliminary lessons learned from that conflict. Demonstrate how a parallel can be drawn between the Israeli-Hezbollah case and that of the United States and Al Qaeda. Discuss the implications of this assessment for the “global war on terror.”