After Chilcot: The ‘Doctrine of International Community’ and the UK Decision to Invade Iraq

Abstract

This article draws on the publicly available oral and documentary evidence produced by the Iraq Inquiry to interrogate the policy impact of the ‘doctrine of international community’, which Tony Blair first articulated during the 1999 Kosovo campaign. Guided by that doctrine, the UK's objective was to reconcile US policy and the UN Security Council. There were two ways to do this: to convince the Bush administration that disarming Iraq was enough and that regime change was a step too far; or to convince the Security Council that disarmament was insufficient and that regime change was necessary. Unfortunately both these strategies failed to deliver the UK objective. To go to war under these circumstances revealed a flaw in the original doctrine, which was to assume that individual states could speak for international society even when they were opposed by a majority of states on the UN Security Council.