The Iraq War as a Failure to Bargain

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 1,3, University of California, San Diego (Department of Political Science), course: Introduction to International Relations, language: English, abstract: Bargaining can be described as a zero-sum game: when two players interact with each other, the outcome of a bargaining will make one of these two players better off at the expense of the other. In the following essay, I will demonstrate why the Iraq war in 2003 was a failure to bargain. Using the approach of the World Politics book by Frieden, Lake, and Schultz (2010), I will analyze interests, interactions, and institutions with regard to this bargaining failure between the United States and Iraq.