THE FIRST AND THE ONLY OPTION: THE WAR Analysis of Bush’s Personality and Decision Making Process of Iraq War

Abstract

On March 17, George W. Bush declared an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. In his words, he asked from Saddam to give up from Baghdad and he gave 48 hours to Saddam Hussein and his two sons in order to leave Iraq. He added the confrontation will be resulted with military conflict. On March 2003, a surprise invasion was started to Iraq by the US-led coalition. Investigating backstage of the war decision is important because Iraq War was the most important hard power policy of the US since the Vietnam War. While the paper has no intention to analyze the Iraq War in detail, it mostly deals with decision-making process of the invasion by focusing on Bush’s personality. The paper uses LTA as strategy in order to measure George W. Bush’s conceptual complexity and self-confidence traits to explore whether these traits lead the US to the war. Within this context, conceptual complexity, self-confidence and hard power discourse were analyzed through content analysis in QDA software program. While the analysis finds out that after September 11, Bush had low conceptual complexity and high self-confidence in along with increasing hard power discourse, Hermann’s (2005) openness to information model was applied. The paper concludes that when self-confidence is higher than conceptual complexity, the leaders tend to be closed to information and they make decisions according to their images and truths.

Keywords

• Foreign Policy Analysis,Iraq War,George W. Bush,Leadership Trait Analysis,conceptual complexity,self-confidence,Hermann

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