September 11 and the Need for a Social Science Research Agenda

Comparing US propaganda strategies after September 11 with those of the Gulf War and the Bosnia Conflict the paper argues that targeted propaganda measures were not needed in order to plant military logic in the public mind. All that was needed was a lack of understanding of the terror attack and its pseudoexplanation in terms of groundless hate. It was this mind-set, which rejected any analysis of the conflict sources, which ruled out any resolution other than the elimination of the enemy, and which even denied his most essential human rights. And it is this mind set, which threatens to reduce democracy to a pure façade, to destroy its credibility and to produce even more hatred against the Western world.