Constructivist-Institutionalism and the Invasion of Iraq: Crisis, Learning and the National Interest

Abstract

Constructivist accounts of America’s invasion of Iraq have been united by their social philosophy and empirical assertions that in light of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the G.W. Bush Administration began radically changing the postulation with which foreign policy was calculated and these changes led to the Iraq conflict. Many accounts, however, fail to provide sufficient accounts of agent’s strategic action and demonstrate their causal ascription. With the aim of rectifying these oversights, a neo-institutionalist methodology will be fused with the constructivist insights and provide a systematic approach to explaining when, how and why events became important to the emergence of the 2003 Iraq policy. It is argued that by merging historical context and discursive constructions of crisis, the Iraq policy can be revealed as a product of social learning, with the failures of the Clinton foreign policy and new lessons learned in Afghanistan proving crucial. Keywords: Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism, Crisis, USA, Foreign Policy