Search results
This chapter provides a reasonably cool and rational account of the development of neoconservative views on US foreign policy, culminating in the decision to invade Iraq. Most of the leading first generation neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell, attended the City College of New York in the 1930s. The neoconservative role within the George H. W. Bush administration, however, was rather more equivocal. Generally, the admistration neocons were second-level "junior ministers," much as they had been in the Ronald Reagan or Bush senior administrations. Bushite pragmatism was seen as much in Bush senior's resolve to "avoid dancing on the Berlin Wall," as in the allowing of Saddam Hussein to remain safe in Baghdad two years later. The pragmatic realism of the 1991 decision to cease action in Iraq was defended in the memoirs of Colin Powell, the elder Bush and Brent Scowcroft.
This book examines the intellectual frameworks within which the case for war in Iraq has developed in the US and the UK. It analyzes the neoconservative roots of the decision to go to war. The book also analyzes the humanitarian intervention rationale that was developed in the context of the Kosovo campaign, Tony Blair's presentation of it, and the case of Iraq. It looks at the parallel processes through which the George Bush administration and Blair government constructed their cases for war, analyzing similarities and divergences in approach. The book considers the loci of the intelligence failure over Iraq, the lessons for the intelligence communities, and the degree to which the decision to go to war in Iraq represented a policy rather than an intelligence failure. It then complements the analyses of US prewar intelligence failures by analysing what post-war inquiries have revealed about the nature of the failure in the UK case. The book discusses the relationship between intelligence and policymaking. It looks at how US Congress dealt with intelligence before the war. The book also examines how the Bush administration tried to manage public opinion in support of its war policies. It then looks at the decisionmaking process of the Bush administration in the year before the war in Iraq. Finally, the book also provides excerpts from a number of speeches and documents which are key to understanding the nature of national security decisionmaking and intelligence failure.
equipped to challenge the exercise of executive power in this area. The structure of the book The book is divided into five parts. The first examines the intellectual frameworks within which the case for war in Iraq was developed in the US and UK. In Chapter 2 , John Dumbrell analyzes the neoconservative roots of the decision to go to war. He traces the evolution of neoconservative thinking on foreign and