ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of intellectual problems one encounters in the study of foreign policy. It presents a framework for analyzing foreign policy and applies to a particular case: the United States' decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Regarding the situational typology, at least three types of decisions can be identified. What could be called macro-decisions conform most closely to what is ordinarily implied by the term "policy". Many other foreign policy decisions, in contrast, can be labeled micro-decisions, which are more administrative in nature. Realism and idealism both purport to offer an empirical theory explaining how the world actually works, including what drives US foreign policy. In weighing the morality of the US invasion of Iraq, one starts with the observation that Saddam Hussein was arguably as brutal a dictator as one could find on the planet. Many observers raised some troubling moral questions about America's own behavior in the Iraq affair.
