ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 draws out the book’s key empirical and theoretical implications. A number of points stand out. First, the Blair government was to a large extent the author of its own failures over Iraq. It pursued a communicative approach to foreign policy legitimization without meeting the normative standards required for such an approach to work. At the same time, it made unconvincing and at times incoherent or contradictory arguments that reduced its persuasiveness. Ministers faced a difficult battle in 2002 and 2003. Public attitudes do not shift easily, and they are not particularly susceptible to official pressure, especially when the best official arguments depend on information the government feels unable to share. But it played the cards it held badly. Second, treating public opinion as a sociological phenomenon and linking it to the intersubjective construction of foreign policy legitimacy works. This study offers a number of insights about how and why the pre-invasion British public debate over Iraq played out the way it did, and what it meant for the policy in the longer-term. These insights go beyond what most informed observers report. Third, the way a government talks about a foreign policy decision affects the kinds of decisions it can make. This is an important point in FPA terms, as it points to how efforts at opinion management can generate feedback into the policymaking process. Several of the difficulties the Blair government faced resulted from making commitments at one stage of the pre-invasion debate it later struggled to honour, such as the commitment to work through a UN process. This points towards a constructivist version of the ‘two-level game’ model.
