Theory in Action: The War in Iraq 

According to these three people, one could easily make an argument in favour using any of the 3 major IR theories.

Morphing Reality The concensus among each discipline in International Relations and these three individuals was and remains against the Iraq war though. I'm curious to see how you could use these individuals' interpretations in favour of the Iraq war. That'd be fascinating.

I meant use the actual theories. Realism: Security and Power are paramount. Saddam was increasing his personal power while flushing his country down the gutter, he tried to assassinate a US president, shot the coalition planes patrolling two thirds of his airspace every day from 1991-2003. He was trying to get nukes, just read the book by his old chief nuclear scientist "The Bomb in My Garden". He was paying salaries to Palestinian suicide bombers... These are all existential threats to the US national interest. Saddam wasn't going to stop on his own, either he would start a confrontation or his entire country would implode and devolve into civil war between his sons or war between Iran/SA/Turkey all looking for a piece. American intervention prevented all of that nonsense. Liberalism: Cooperation and Interdependence are paramount. You *cannot* cooperate with, or depend on, a psychopathic crime family with a grip on one of the most geopolitically important spots on the globe. In 2006 Iraq, and Saddam Hussein if he was still alive, would have been the head of the UN non-proliferation committee.. You can try to ignore them but that isn't actually going to work as long as the West relies on oil from the Middle East, which might be starting to change. Constructivism: Arguably the easiest one, constructivists like international norms, they like to look at context and they claim that ideas are paramount. Saddam Hussein spent his life pissing on international norms, the context of his brutality is that he is a buffer between Saudi Arabia and Iran, you don't want a psychopath in charge of the area between two major powers that could very quickly ruin the entire region if not the world. This is quick and off the top of my head, there's obviously more detail and nuance for every aspect of this intervention. I'll leave you one other bit, they all sort of come to a conclusion that we should 'stay out of their business' because it isn't within the US sphere of interest. Let's say we did that after the Ottoman Empire collapsed (an empire that just called on all Muslims in its borders to fight in the first world war, declaring it as a jihad.) What would we have today? Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and maybe Egypt would exist today, except they would all be 3x larger and have access to double the oil. Tell me...does that sound like a desirable outcome to you??? How many Wahhabi Madrasas would be built? How much more or less prevalent would terrorism be? How much more or less prosperous would the Middle East be? These questions are not easy to solve either way. The vast majority of people against the Iraq war don't take into account that a confrontation there was inevitable, conflict has been synonymous with human nature since we've been humans.

Morphing Reality I tip my hat off to you for your detailed and well written response. Regarding the politics, the biggest issue of the Iraq war for many, including myself, was not necessarily the aims of the war itself but the execution of it all. The US is only one country and for many reasons, it is in America's best interests to garner support from allied nations if these wars are to be achieved. Internationally, the confidence in the Iraq war initiative was lukewarm. Bush's government ended up not being able to get much support. Canada, France, Germany and others didn't even involve themselves. This lack of support was argued as to be reason enough to reassess the viability of the Iraq war and how to approach it, if at all. There are many other angles at which people have discussed the Iraq war, either to support or oppose it. If Bush instead got widespread international support though, the Iraq war could have been very different but I won't speculate to what effect.

Well said, and thank you. The only issue I have with arguing execution is that you can only do it effectively post hoc, we can try to predict the effectiveness of the execution beforehand but that is thin ice because you could argue against almost any conflict that way. Another aspect of that argument is that today war is broadcast in a way that it never was before. It would be fair to assume that most people (especially in the era of safe spaces and trigger warnings) just don't have the stomach for what war actually entails, one photo of an individual child can cloud the judgement of an entire populace fairly quickly. What we did in WW2 is just definitively off the table for the West today because it would cause riots and revolutions, yet one could argue it was absolutely necessary and arguably a moral act to engage in war to prevent further onslaught. On the point of getting a proper coalition that is a fair assumption given the standard the US and others are supposedly held to. As a caveat though, look into France's recent military history, they've sort of started notifying the UN, but in the past the generals and the president/prime minister would literally inform nobody. Not the people of France, not the parliament, not the UN, not their allies, they had a bunch of conflicts where this was the method, and it worked pretty well for them. Most people don't look at France as a hawkish warmongering state in the way they look at the US. There's certainly reasonable positions on both sides. In my view though, it seems most people don't understand the circumstances well enough and they're outright against it "becuz Bush lied about WMDs" as if congress and senate didn't vote for 23 reasons to enter Iraq, only one of which was WMD.

***** I've since taken a few philosophy papers and no longer agree with this ontological relativism. And therefore do not agree with this world view!

I am trying to determine whether or not I agree with constructivism. I feel the compartmentalization of facts or incidents and then seeing the relationship/correlation between them could lead to understanding the cause... what made you change your view?

Peachy Jones I have since changed my view again. I now agree with what he said.

@@Magnolias_Burden Did you end up going along with constructivism? I feel like it's a lot more unwieldy than the other ideologies but with some work would be the most accurate.

@@feixjones yes & I continue to believe in constructivism. It is more cumbersome yet it considers more thought, more opinions, and is overall more inclusive than the other ideologies. I feel for those reasons, it would be more accurate.

But It's built on totally presuppositions such as the transcendental human nature or the supremacy of souverainty. Just cause E. Carr calls them realists, doesn't mean anything. Remember,: Nazis called themselves national socialists, China is the people's Republic and N Korea calls itself democratic.

Trump is a lunatic with no intellectual ability.

why do you think that?

@GET RAD Lmao me too I'm cramming for a final