Who are the insurgents? : Sunni Arab rebels in Iraq
• Building a profile of a typical anti-coalition Sunni Arab insurgent in Iraq is a daunting task. Demographic information about the insurgents is fragmented, and the rebels themselves are marked more by their heterogeneity than by their homogeneity. Drawing from a wide array of sources, however, we can try to piece together a view of their primary motivations for taking up arms against the U.S.-led occupation.
End-game : why American interventions become quagmires
Why have the major post 9/11 U.S. military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances, major capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories, the wars in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq (2003-2011; 2014-present) turned bloody and intractable. The inability to design and manage war termination is an important part of the explanation why successful military operations to overthrow two third-world regimes failed to achieve favorable and durable outcomes. This thesis uses the abductive research method to develop three hypotheses to investigate these problems. Hypothesis #1: The failure to consider war termination heightens the risk of selecting a myopic strategy that has a low probability of success. Hypothesis #2: Cognitive obstacles, political frictions, and patron-client problems can impede the ability to recognize and abandon an ineffective or losing strategy. Hypothesis #3. When the United States tires of the war and decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries can undermine the prospects of a favorable outcome. These hypotheses are examined in the case studies and used to draw conclusions. Three main findings emerge. First, the United States government has no organized way to consider war termination and thus selected strategies that overestimated the prospects of decisive military victory. Second, the United States was slow to recognize and modify or abandon losing strategies. In both cases, U.S. officials believed their strategies were working even as the situations deteriorated. Third, once the United States decided to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermined the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome.
Negotiating the cultural and economic outcomes of sport heritage attractions: the case of the National Baseball Hall of Fame
ABSTRACT Contemporary museums must balance their roles as commercial entities and repositories of various, and often dissonant, heritages and histories. Sports museums in particular often have clear commercial and nostalgic aims, particularly through tourist visitation, though the extent to which they represent more challenging narratives remains unclear. This paper examines how one of the most famous sports museums in the world, the National Baseball Hall of Fame (NBHF) in Cooperstown, New York, balances its dual role as tourist attraction and repository of baseball's sometimes checkered past. It was found that different sections of the museum provide greater or lesser degrees of engagement with more controversial issues, although the commercial outputs and appeal of the museum remains clear throughout. Utlimately, the NBHF demonstrates that balancing veneration and critique in collections can be commercially prosperous, and can provide a template for other sport and popular culture museums who may be wary of incorporating more challenging narratives in their exhibits. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship between the Hall of Fame and the village of Cooperstown, particularly in creating and maintaining cultural and economic outputs, requires further exploration.