This essay takes concepts from early examples of a literature that is seldom used in foreign policy analysisFthe literature on agenda setting in the U.S. governmentFand applies it to the case study of the U.S. decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. After a brief case history, the essay examines various core themes in the agenda-setting framework, and finds that concepts such as policy communities, focusing events, and policy windows can help explain the U.S. decision to go to war. The purpose of the essay is not to advance the current state of agenda-setting research, whose focus is usually not on explaining decision-making processes within the executive branch; the purpose, instead, is to revive an older framework of analysis from the agendasetting field and demonstrate its utility in examining foreign policy behavior. The essay suggests that the agenda-setting literature could offer similar insights to many other examples of foreign policy decision making, and concludes by suggesting a handful of broader lessons of the agenda-setting paradigm for the analysis of national behavior.The U.S. decision to intervene in Iraq was, in the view of some observers, the result of a classic groupthink process. To others, it stemmed from one or another cognitive errorFperhaps wishful thinking, or cognitive dissonance, or bad analogies. A more traditional way to view the decision would be in rational actor terms: President George W. Bush and his key aides defined their objectives, considered alternatives, weighed the risks and benefits of each, and selected the option that maximized benefits and minimized risks. To the extent that the decision to invade has been studied at all, the results tend to imply one of these wellknown theories to explain the choiceFtheories such as groupthink, groupthink, cognitive errors, or pure rational action. But one much less frequently used conceptFthe literature on agenda settingFoffers at least as much insight into the question of why the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and may be useful in cases well beyond the Iraq War in explaining national security choices.This essay's goal is not to advance the state of research on key debates in the agenda-setting literature. That insightful and by now quite extensive literature has come a long way from the contributions of the sources I will rely uponFbut its focus is most often on domestic politics, and especially agenda-setting within the Congress. 1 Another area of agenda-setting focus, and the one that deals most often
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