Using a Virtual History Conference to Teach the Iraq War

Abstract

In teaching the causes of the Iraq War, the use of ''virtual history'' can be employed in a conference setting in which different individuals are assigned to different plausible counterfactuals they use to construct virtual histories. The Iraq War lends itself to the virtual history approach because of the availability of many plausible counterfactuals at each of the various levels of analysis (individual, state=group, and international) at which the war has been explained. I report here on both the theoretical and pedagogical value of the virtual history conference in the study of the Iraq War.