Cook's resignation from the English government due to his rejection of the policy lead by downing street on the subject of the war on Iraq

Extract

[...] Foreign policy is only a means of the domestic policy in the case of the Iraq war, as it was for the Afghan war. It is not a foreign policy that strikes to achieve something abroad as an end in itself, no : it is a policy that aims to achieve foreign changes in order to achieve domestic political goals. So to conclude, in a way you can really say that Britain did got to war for US republican domestic politics because that is why the war was fought. [...]

[...] Now, why would the British government go to war for reasons of US republican domestic politics? Which were these reasons? One of them certainly was to reassure the American people that they were still the dominant country and not the one that was in danger. To do that, Bush had to attack, he had to show effective results in destroying the Al Qaeda network. The US had to do it alone otherwise it might have seen as the US needed some kind of help to achieve their domestic security goals. [...]

[...] To my point of view it saw the possible economic, moral and political rewards it could get out of it if everything went quickly the way they wanted it to. So if it joined the war it was to get something out if it, but at the same time it would not have launched the war on its own. Had the American government never planned that war, Britain would not have thought about seriously. Iraq would have stayed a harmless country that did not have a democratic government, as many others. If you now look at the US foreign policy, it is very linked to its domestic one. [...]

[...] Cook's resignation from the English government due to his rejection of the policy lead by downing street on the subject of the war on Iraq On March 18th 2003, Robin Cook resigned from government because he did want to go to war in Iraq without a strong international coalition and a UN resolution backing it up. To him, the British government went to war not because of British reasons but rather for US foreign policy and Republican domestic policy ones. [...]