Explaining the Iraq War

Frank P. Harvey was recently appointed University Research Professor of International Relations at Dalhousie University. He held the 2007 J. William Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies (SUNY, Plattsburgh), is a Senior Research Fellow with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and was former Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie.

'Counterfactuals are too often rhetorical weapons of mass destruction rather than conceptual tools for parsing the logic of causal claims. Harvey brings much needed rigor to a particularly bitterly divisive what-if debate, that over the 2003 Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.' Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania

• 1. Comparative counterfactual analysis and the 2003 Iraq War; 2. Leadership, political context(s) and the Iraq War; 3. Democratic national security advisers; 4. Domestic and congressional politics; 5. American intelligence failures and miscalculations; 6. Societal pressures and public opinion; 7. International politics, global WMD consensus and UN power balancing; 8. Hussein's mistakes, miscalculations and misperceptions; 9. Summary and implications; 10. Conclusion.