The Effect of British Intervention in Southern Iraq

The Chillcott Report looks at British involvement in southern Iraq without really looking in detail at what the effect of Iraqi politics is. And here the two stories do intertwine because one thing that's happening in the later stages of British involvement is that they're supporting the government of Nouriel Maliki, then Prime Minister of Iraq. So to call it particularly a form of democratic stability would be to mislabel it. The real transition is not so much about politics in a vacuum, but the politics of an increasingly authoritarian state within Iraq over that period.