Introduction

The Iraq War of 2003 was one of the most controversial wars fought by the United States and the United Kingdom in the post-1945 period and arguably the most radical.

The drive to war generated unprecedented levels of public protest and caused major and often very public diplomatic and political divisions between states, including those within the ‘club’ of Western democracies. Whilst the war itself was a brief affair, a year after George W.Bush declared the cessation of hostilities there remained a high level of military insurgency, political disorder and uncertainty over the future. The war continues to cast a long shadow over domestic politics and to command high-profile media attention. Yet from the national political institutions that bestowed or withheld their authority for the war, as a value system through which the legitimacy of the war has been contested, to the political model for a post-Saddam Iraq, democracy has been intimately intertwined with the war. It is this relationship, between democracy, democratic politics and the war, that forms the subject matter of this book.