The Marketplace That Failed: Iraq, Threat Inflation, and the Nuclear Program That Did Not Exist
As Jack Snyder has recently pointed out, the arguments used to justify both the Bush Doctrine and the war in Iraq – wildly inflated threat assessments, “paper tiger” images of opponents, the domino theory, and the “Big Stick” theory – closely resemble the complex of “myths of empire” that led past challengers for European or global hegemony such as France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union to overstretch their national capacities and encircle themselves with rings of enemies.
Myths of the Balkans
So Sir Alexander Cadogan, the senior civil servant in the British Foreign Office, confided to his diary on July 10, 1940. His successors of the 1990s cannot afford these luxuries of ignorance or neglect; the Balkans, it seems, are always with us. In the post - cold war world "that deplorable part of the world" not only persuaded NATO to fire its first shots in anger but has, some would argue, brought about a redefinition of the nature and function of international relations.
The Other Balkan Wars
(A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in retrospect with a new introduction and reflection on the present conflict by George F. KENNAN)
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The Role of the Mass Media in the Run-Up for the 1989-1992 Military Conflict in Transdniestria, Information Blockade and the Manipulation of Public Opinion
The political, social and ethnic dissatisfaction, which had been spoken out only in the kitchen ar the household level, is splashed out in the mass media. The Gorbachev’s glasnost abo-lishes all the earlier forbidden topics and for this reason the news-papers, the radio and the TV acquire an extremely weighty status. At the end of the 80’s the society begins to be divided on the basis of the ethno-political principle owing to the media to great extent.