As debate continues over the conduct, the legality and the morality of the war in Iraq, this article addresses how and why Prime Minister Blair decided on the British road to war in Iraq. The article argues that Tony Blair was working within a mindset at both the domestic and international levels that meant he was predisposed to use military force against Iraq and indeed against other perceived threats to the West. His mindset arose, we will argue, through fear rather than arrogance, through the experiences of the past two decades as much as contemporary events, and this meant that he systematically over-estimated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. We postulate that Blair was not pressured into invading Iraq by President Bush. Rather, he believed that it was the right path for Britain to take, and that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was actually the logical outcome of the ‘Doctrine of the International Community’ outlined in his Chicago speech in 1999. We go on to make the claim that by concentrating on supporting the United States in its grand strategy, Tony Blair misunderstood the pattern of politics at home and perhaps more seriously of the ‘threat’ to the domestic security of the United Kingdom. This was not a danger from Iraqi WMD or even from ‘foreign’ terrorists as had happened on 9/11 but from home-grown suicide bombers, some of whom claimed to be inspired by opposition to Blair’s wars. This was the blowback that mattered – and will continue to do so – for the UK.
Viewed from the perspective of 2006, possibly no other area within the British university system appears so vibrant as that of International Affairs, International Studies or International Relations. Whenever the label of 'international' is attached to a teaching programme, students wish to study it. This is the case at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. It is also true in a rather broader sense. Research centres and institutes are fl ourishing and expanding, and the number of journals, books and articles that deal with international issues are increasing at a similar rate.There are, of course, many reasons for this beyond the (obvious) charisma of those of us who teach and study the 'international'. 9/11, 7/7, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the 'long war on terror' have evoked a vast amount of commentary. The preoccupation with and anxieties over the Bush Administration and its foreign policy have added to the fascination many scholars have found in trying to make sense of our world, and indeed the worlds of humankind spread across the globe. The challenges posed by environmental degradation, natural disasters and wars (and the ethical dilemmas associated with all of these issues) provoke and make us ponder the really huge questions of how it is that so few live in comfort, and so many live on the brink, if not of extinction then of poverty and insecurity. These are the issues that students want to study -and they want to understand these questions because they see that they are real and important, and that they do and will make a difference to their own lives, and to the lives of everyone on the planet. Even if the study of politics, traditionally understood in terms of government systems and public policy, is also popular with students, it cannot or perhaps should not be studied without some understanding of how the domestic connects to the international and back again. The stuff of international politics is therefore alive and well within the university sector and, I would argue, within the civic life of certainly the United Kingdom and Western Europe. The public protests against the politics of the G8 in Scotland in the summer of 2005, and the massive march against the war in Iraq in London in 2003, are surely testimony to a consciousness outside the so-called ivory towers that people understand the importance of how states behave in the international arena, and that actions taken in seemingly faraway places such as Iraq do have consequences on the streets of London.Yet some colleagues have a problem in seeing the translation of this enthusiasm and these anxieties into the so-called discipline of International Relations. Are we not, they ask, simply translating that enthusiasm and concern into a narrowly defi ned set of methodological assumptions governed by a largely North American fetish for quantitative methods and so-called theoretical rigour? In the rush to gain alleged International Relations
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