Academics respond to the Chilcot report into the nations role in the Iraq War
Researchers from the Department of Politics and International Relations have commented on the Chilcot report, a British public inquiry into the nation's role in the Iraq War, published on Wednesday 6 July.
Dr Robert Dover has written two opinion pieces about the report for Think: Leicester, the University's platform for academic opinion pieces. In the first, published the day before the Chilcot report went live, he outlined four key lessons from the Iraq war and what he believed the Chilcot report was likely to say. In the second, Dr Dover suggests that while the decision was a bad one, history should be kinder about the decision to go to war - a complex decision made within a hectic policy environment with incomplete information, prior to the intelligence reforms that were subsequently seen in the UK.
Dr David Strachan-Morris has written an article outlining how the Iraq War was only one of the options available to the UK - and was taken before all other options were exhausted, with the Chilcot report acting as a damning indictment of British intelligence agencies, their capabilities, and their relationships to policymakers and to each other.
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