ABSTRACT
In the decades since the Suez conflict of 1956, no major external war involving the United Kingdom has generated more turmoil within the governing party and doubts about the judgement of the prime minister, nor more anti-war protest throughout the country, than the Iraq War of 2003. In the same period no major conflict has aroused so much contention about the legitimacy of the war, the United Kingdom’s international reputation and relations with the United States and other countries. In sharp contrast with major conflicts like the Falklands and the Gulf, Iraq had not triggered a Western military response by a sudden, grave and clearly illegal act. The war was not preceded by an Iraqi attack on another state nor by the emergence of an urgent threat to international order. Rather in the period from 1999 until 2003, Iraq’s domestic and international behaviour, however disdainful of the United Nations, had not altered significantly Thus in the lead-up to the war, the Blair administration had to make strenuous efforts to persuade the Labour Party, Parliament, the public and media that going to war was a necessity not a choice. The government faced the immense handicap of a widespread perception that after the attack on the United States of 2001 an influential section of the Bush administration used that traumatic event to attack Iraq, irrespective of Baghdad’s behaviour.
