Paying the Human Costs of War

Paying the Human Costs of War PDF Author: Christopher Gelpi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
From the Korean War to the current conflict in Iraq, Paying the Human Costs of War examines the ways in which the American public decides whether to support the use of military force. Contrary to the conventional view, the authors demonstrate that the public does not respond reflexively and solely to the number of casualties in a conflict. Instead, the book argues that the public makes reasoned and reasonable cost-benefit calculations for their continued support of a war based on the justifications for it and the likelihood it will succeed, along with the costs that have been suffered in casualties. Of these factors, the book finds that the most important consideration for the public is the expectation of success. If the public believes that a mission will succeed, the public will support it even if the costs are high. When the public does not expect the mission to succeed, even small costs will cause the withdrawal of support. Providing a wealth of new evidence about American attitudes toward military conflict, Paying the Human Costs of War offers insights into a controversial, timely, and ongoing national discussion.

Paying the Human Costs of War

Paying the Human Costs of War PDF Author: Christopher Gelpi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Korean War to the current conflict in Iraq, Paying the Human Costs of War examines the ways in which the American public decides whether to support the use of military force. Contrary to the conventional view, the authors demonstrate that the public does not respond reflexively and solely to the number of casualties in a conflict. Instead, the book argues that the public makes reasoned and reasonable cost-benefit calculations for their continued support of a war based on the justifications for it and the likelihood it will succeed, along with the costs that have been suffered in casualties. Of these factors, the book finds that the most important consideration for the public is the expectation of success. If the public believes that a mission will succeed, the public will support it even if the costs are high. When the public does not expect the mission to succeed, even small costs will cause the withdrawal of support. Providing a wealth of new evidence about American attitudes toward military conflict, Paying the Human Costs of War offers insights into a controversial, timely, and ongoing national discussion.

The Deaths of Others

The Deaths of Others PDF Author: John Tirman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

To End All Wars

To End All Wars PDF Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547549210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
In this riveting and suspenseful New York Times best-selling book, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before... World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Hochschild forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn’t cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?

Fat-Talk Nation

Fat-Talk Nation PDF Author: Susan Greenhalgh
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801456436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
In recent decades, America has been waging a veritable war on fat in which not just public health authorities, but every sector of society is engaged in constant "fat talk" aimed at educating, badgering, and ridiculing heavy people into shedding pounds. We hear a great deal about the dangers of fatness to the nation, but little about the dangers of today’s epidemic of fat talk to individuals and society at large. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing—and it is virtually unknown. How do those who do not fit the "ideal" body type feel being the object of abuse, discrimination, and even revulsion? How do people feel being told they are a burden on the healthcare system for having a BMI outside what is deemed—with little solid scientific evidence—"healthy"? How do young people, already prone to self-doubt about their bodies, withstand the daily assault on their body type and sense of self-worth? In Fat-Talk Nation, Susan Greenhalgh tells the story of today’s fight against excess pounds by giving young people, the campaign’s main target, an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame.Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, "bad BMIs," and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. It reveals that regardless of their weight, many people feel miserable about their bodies, and almost no one is able to lose weight and keep it off. Greenhalgh argues that attempts to rescue America from obesity-induced national decline are damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people and disrupting families and intimate relationships.Fatness today is not primarily about health, Greenhalgh asserts; more fundamentally, it is about morality and political inclusion/exclusion or citizenship. To unpack the complexity of fat politics today, Greenhalgh introduces a cluster of terms—biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat personhood—and shows how they work together to produce such deep investments in the attainment of the thin, fit body. These concepts, which constitute a theory of the workings of our biocitizenship culture, offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might work to reverse course for the next generation.

War and the Health of Nations

War and the Health of Nations PDF Author: Zaryab Iqbal
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477370X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Assessments of the costs of war generally focus on the financial, political, military, and territorial risks associated with involvement in violent conflict. Often overlooked are the human costs of war, particularly their effects on population well-being. In War and the Health of Nations, Zaryab Iqbal explores these human costs by offering the first large-scale empirical study of the relationship between armed conflict and population health. Working within the influential "human security" paradigm—which emphasizes the security of populations rather than states as the central object of global security—Iqbal analyzes the direct and indirect mechanisms through which violent conflict degrades population health. In addition to battlefield casualties, these include war's detrimental economic effects, its role in the creation of refugees and forced migration, and the destruction of societies' infrastructure. In doing so, she provides a comprehensive picture of the processes through which war and violent conflict affect public health and the well-being of societies in a cross-national context. War and the Health of Nations provides a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the influence of violent interstate and intrastate conflict on the quality of life of populations and empirically analyzes the war-and-health relationship through statistical models using a universal sample of states. The analyses provide strong evidence for the direct as well as the indirect effects of war on public health and offer important insights into key socio-economic determinants of health achievement. The book thus demonstrates the significance of population health as an important consequence of armed conflict and highlights the role of societal vulnerabilities in studies of global security.

Confronting the Costs of War

Confronting the Costs of War PDF Author: Michael N. Barnett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
What determines the strategies by which a state mobilizes resources for war? And does war preparation strengthen or weaken the state in relation to society? In addressing these questions, Michael Barnett develops a novel theoretical framework that traces the connection between war preparation and changes in state-society relations, and applies that framework to Egypt from 1952 to 1977 and Israel from 1948 through 1977. Confronting the Costs of War addresses major issues in international relations, comparative politics, and Middle Eastern studies.

On War

On War PDF Author: Carl von Clausewitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


Cotton and Race in the Making of America

Cotton and Race in the Making of America PDF Author: Gene Dattel
Publisher: Government Institutes
ISBN: 1442210192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Erasing Iraq

Erasing Iraq PDF Author: Michael Otterman
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Documents and describes the effect of decades of U.S. policy and recent wars on the country and people of Iraq.

The United States of War

The United States of War PDF Author: David Vine
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.