Politics & Policy • Volume 34 • No. 1 • March 2006 © 2006 by the Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved. The War About the War: Iraq and the Politics of National Security Advising in the G.W. Bush Administration’s First Term Chris J. Dolan, Ph.D. University of Central Florida David B. Cohen, Ph.D. The University of Akron The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which the management system and foreign policy advisory structures of the George W. Bush Administration led the president to launch the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. We contend that the decision to attack Iraq was an outgrowth of the conflict that began when the administration’s national security team was assembled after Bush’s electoral victory and was a by- product of the president’s management style. We devote significant attention to the internal battles surrounding the decision for war between those who believe in a traditional multilateral approach (realists) to world politics and those who believe in a Pax Americana built on unilateralism (neocons). The article concludes that in addition to the way President Bush organized the decision-making process, his propensity for delegating responsibility to others combined with policy making structures built largely on consensus and personality factors, as opposed to procedures and processes, ultimately drove the White House toward the use of military force in Iraq. Four years after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and his advisers have altered America’s national security orientation from multilateralism toward unilateral preventive war, have asserted U.S. global preeminence, and have put the world on notice that the war against terrorism would continue for the foreseeable future. These pillars have come to form what many describe as the Bush Doctrine (Glad and Dolan 2004). In particular, the strategic doctrinal alteration in American foreign policy priorities and the decision to invade Iraq were contrived by the architects of the Bush administration’s preventive war objectives, the sources of which pre-date the 9/11 attacks. In the Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAPOPLPolitics & Policy1555-56232006 Blackwell Publishing LtdMarch 2006341••••Original Articles The War About the WarPolitics & Policy