The Political Economy of Anglo-American Foreign Policy.

Many explanations have been advanced in the face of the obvious failures of the official British and U.S. explanations to account for the war being waged on Iraq. In the U.K., discussion has tended to focus almost exclusively on the United States, with British involvement treated as tangential or at most supplemental, and explained largely with reference to aspects of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personality or some broadly conceived U.K. national interest in maintaining close political relations with the United States. Missing from the discussion is recognition of recurrent features of U.K. foreign policy towards the Middle East and their relation to fundamental aspects of British political-economy, the increasing integration of British and U.S. capital, and the largely Anglo-American-led project of global economic re-structuring currently taking place. This paper focuses on British and U.S. interests in Iraq and larger Anglo-American ambitions that divide the U.K. and U.S. from France, Germany, and other EU and non-EU countries. Part I of the paper briefly reviews the history of British and U.S. foreign policies towards Iraq and the culmination of these policies in the invasion and take-over of the country. Part II places these events in the context of the political-economy of U.K.-U.S. relations and an on-going Anglo-American project of global reconstruction. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]