ABSTRACT
The Bush Administration’s selling of the Iraq War to the American people has highlighted the issue of threat inflation. In their introduction to this volume, the editors define threat inflation as the depiction of a threat “that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify” (page 1). This definition of threat inflation immediately raises a number of interesting questions:
1 can we measure threats “objectively”? 2 how much of an error is necessary for us to label an assessment as “inflated” or
“deflated”? and 3 why do some people see particular countries as more threatening than other
people?
