The mother of all post-mortems

ABSTRACT

The most striking finding of the Chilcot Report is that the record reveals little that was previously unknown. A key point for its authors is that diplomatic alternatives had not been exhausted when the US and UK went to war. But, short of an armed attack by the other side, it is hard to say when they would have been. Here what was crucial was the belief shared by Bush and Blair that Saddam Hussain would not and could not change. For the British the issue of whether alternatives to war remained is particularly important because of its implications for international law, something that did not trouble the Americans. It remains unclear if Blair would have gained or lost leverage over Bush had he made British participation contingent on better American policy, for example on developing a workable plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.

KEYWORDS:

• Chilcot Report
• Iraq war
• postmortems

Notes

¹ Richard E. Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia UP 1970); Richard E. Neustadt, Report to J. F. K: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell UP 1999).

² Gill Bennett, Six Moments of Crises: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford UP 2013).

³ Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1960) Ch. 2.

⁴ Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell UP 2010), 135–6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Jervis

Robert Jervis is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University. His most recent book is How Statesmen Think (Princeton University Press, 2017). He was President of the American Political Science Association in 2000-01 and has received career achievement awards from the International Society of Political Psychology, ISA’s Security Studies Section, and APSA’s Foreign Policy Section, and he has received honorary degrees from the University of Venice and Oberlin College. In 2006 he received the National Academy of Science’s tri-annual award for behavioral sciences contributions to avoiding nuclear war