US bureaucratic politics and the decision to invade Iraq

Why did the second Bush administration decide to invade Iraq in 2003? This article suggests that the question can usefully be addressed by looking at the ways in which regime change in Iraq became part of bureaucratic politics within the US government – under successive administrations – following the unsatisfactory termination of the first Gulf War in 1991. It is contended here that the limitations on bureaucratic politics within the second Bush administration were important in that the path toward a presidential decision for invasion was cleared by the failure of the higher echelons of the national security bureaucracy under Bush to work effectively in exercising core functions of challenge and debate.