The Influences on British Strategic Decision-Making in the Iraq War 2003 - 2009.

Abstract

This thesis examines the influences on British strategic decision-making in the Iraq war from 2003 to 2009. It makes three inter-related arguments. First, it argues that the influences on British strategic decision-making in Iraq were highly unpredictable, interacting with each other in tense reciprocal relationships as strategy in theory iterated with strategy in practice. There was no 'principal influence' (as in 'first in the order of importance'). Second, it argues that this unpredictability was driven by the presence of 'war' in Iraq's strategic environment, with war simply defined as 'collective killing for some collective purpose'. The endemic failure of British decision-makers to take this unpredictability into account - to understand the nature of war, and its reciprocity with strategy - was at the centre of British strategic failures in Iraq.

Third, the thesis argues that British outcomes in Iraq were constrained by the use of traditional concepts of strategy that overly focused on military force (i.e. what might be called 'military strategy'). The war instead demanded a far broader concept of strategy that aligned all tools of national power in the achievement of British national goals: one more akin to Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman's 'art of creating power'. Finally, this thesis also makes a historical contribution, particularly to our understanding of the middle and latter phases of the war from 2006 to 2009.

The thesis builds this argument through the comparative study of five chronological strategic decisions undertaken by the British between 2003 and 2009. These span the whole surface area of the war, from the decision to join the US-led invasion in March 2003 through to the eventual decision to end the British operation in June 2009. It uses as its primary archive the evidence of the Iraq Inquiry, released in 2016 - inclusive of over 4,000 declassified documents and the transcripts of 184 witness sessions. Grounded in the disciplines of history and the study of strategy, the thesis ends with a series of observations on what can be learned about policy, strategy and the nature and character of war from the British experience in Iraq.