Not clear why "crisis" is worse for the public sphere on FP than "normal" politics based on the press findings above.
Also, how do you establish the baseline for "market failure" for policies or ideas? The analog from economics is hard to identify for politics.
If it comes down to "why didn't the public back the policies I (or someone else) prefers" or "why didn't the political institutions do so," then it is a different question that the failure of the public sphere or deliberative democracy.
"Open and inclusive" need not equate with "my policy preference" or even "the best policy" as I understand it.
This is no knock against deliberative democracy or public sphere arguments. Anyone doing decisionmaking studies of foreign or domestic policy runs into this issue -- the process may have been excellent, but the policy outcome can still be miserable.
9/11 did change risk propensity in the US for the worse, in my opinion.
One significant factor was Neocon control of the press. Obviously, within newspapers and news organizations there is a team of people, commissars if you like, whose job it was to quash or underreport public debate. Note that the huge demonstration in NYC on 17 Feb was reported a minima in the NYT. The giant protests around the world were hardly mentioned in the national US press, whether in print, on the web or broadcast. Perhaps these people are not Neocons. I do not exclude that the US has a secret program run out of the Pentagon with agents on the payroll whose job it is to obstruct public debate.
Whatever it was, why was Congress scared shitless? Was the a risk of physical violence to their person if the war were questioned?
These limitations were imposed to silence the Left. As an example, perhaps I would like to visit Cuba. But there are spies in the Caracas/Mexico City/San Juan airports just waiting for people like me to report us to the govt.
But locally, a fundamentalist Bible group was permitted to go and spend a few weeks. But human secularists are threatened with punishment.
Okay, so not reading your counterpublic argument, I think your line of reasoning on deliberative democracy, and the parsimonious construction argued from Habermasian points of view, prove problematic, even within the bounds of logic for Habermasian inspired critical theorists. Counterfactually, assume that 9/11 was not used a de-rationalizing-emotionalizing device leading up to the Iraq War, people like Scott Ritter possessed as much public weight as any of the neocon pundits, people with radically different perspectives on Iraq gained equal access to the public sphere, the public examined these arguments and deliberated upon them, and politicians reflected these deliberations in meaningful ways. Given this completely imaginary construct, there are still serious moral qualms about exclusion of the public sphere. The public most affected by the decision -- your average Iraqi living in poor conditions because of sanctions and a poorly run economy -- has no access to this debate. How can the people most affected (those to be bombed and "liberated") not have access to the public sphere in which this decision is being made, and we still idealize this conception of the public sphere and the deliberative democracy? Critical theorists think public spheres are bound by lifeworlds (language, culture, values). Do the Iraqis belong in the same lifeworld? Under my understanding of lifeworlds (in an empirical sense of how lifeworlds are defined), I think not. In a morally cosmopolitan sense, they do; at least, in how I read critical theorist Andrew Linklater in his work Post Westphalian Communities. Most critical theorists I read and know do not admit this moral sense. They want a parsimonious conception of democracy, which would avoid a criticism of growing the decision making social situation too large and thus making each person's impact within the public sphere diminished. It seems like I'm leaving this with two bad choices, unless I missed something in this Habermasian paradigm.
As Matt's comment suggests, even a fairly well-functioning public sphere/marketplace of ideas is limited in various ways, e.g. by the restriction of participation to residents within particular 'communities' or state/national boundaries and/or by persons' different levels of access to the means of communication, just to name two.
See my forthcoming in _Security Studies_ for an argument that Krebs/Lobasz get it wrong -- that regime change was a social choice that prevailed in the marketplace for ideas, not in spite of it.
Glad to see that our article is generating discussion, and I look forward to the forthcoming responses.
The War in Iraq was a case-book example of securitization (as in the Copenhagen School). If something is succesfully framed as a real security issue, it is no longer a question of policy and thus (to a certain extent) moves out of the public sphere.
Of course, the War in Iraq only being part of the overall War on Terror, which has itself been securitized
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