Conspiracy thinking is defined as a pattern of explanatory reasoning about events and situations of personal, social, and historical significance in which a "conspiracy" is the dominant or operative ...actor. While conspiracy thinking exists to some extent probably in every society, the authors note the special prevalence of this type of thinking in the Arab-Iranian-Muslim Middle East, and offer a psychoanalytically based approach to conspiracy thinking based on theories of the paranoid process. The authors also attempt to identify aspects of Arab-Iranian-Muslim culture that may predispose individuals from that culture to conspiracy thinking, especially child-rearing practices, attitudes toward sexuality, and the role of secrecy.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science. Thesis. 1968. Ph.D.
Two unnumbered leaves inserted.
Bibliography: v. 3, leaves 618-657.
Ph.D.
President George W. Bush has put democracy promotion at the center of his foreign policy, what I call his "Democracy Doctrine." He has articulated that commitment from the beginning of his ...presidency. But his commitment deepened and became the primary focus of his foreign policy when the initial rationales for the American invasion of Iraq proved to be baseless. No weapons of mass destruction were found at the time of that invasion. Nor were any links between Saddam Hussein and "global terrorism" established. As the rationales disappeared and as the war turned from a campaign against the army of Hussein to a war against an Iraqi insurgency joined by foreign terrorists eager to damage the United States, the President turned to his Democracy Doctrine to justify the entire enterprise. But the promotion of democracy in other countries, especially in the countries of the Islamic world whose people tend to view the United States as the problem and Islam as the solution, will be neither easy nor likely to produce governments friendly to the United States.
"It is clear that continued regional stability and political reform in Iran are in the interest of the United States. The Clinton administration has recognized the positive political changes in Iran ...and has attempted to refashion its foreign policy accordingly. So when Khatami came to power, Washington began to make political overtures to Iran, hoping President Khatami would respond. But the distribution of power in Iran suggests that any U.S. feelers will go unanswered." (WORLD POLICY JOURNAL) This article analyzes U.S.-Iran relations past, present and future.
Direct rule by Islamic clerics in Iran is an important new phenomenon in Middle Eastern politics. The legitimacy of clerical rule is based on an ideology developed from Shiite thought by Ayatollah ...Ruhollah Khomeini and his neofundamentalist followers. This ideology is embodied in the Iranian Constitution, which institutionalizes rule by Islamic clerics. Their sense of legitimacy has been reinforced by Khomeini's commitment to maintaining clerical rule, by his claim to leadership on the basis of a divine calling, and by a monopolization of the interpretation of the sacred law. The principal themes of clerical rule include grandiosity, an insistence on unity, ascription of hostile motives to the actions of other states, a preference for military solutions to political problems, and a belief in ultimate victory. Replication of the Iranian pattern of clerical rule elsewhere in the Middle East will be problematic without the emergence of a figure like Khomeini or the assistance of Iran.
