Recent months have seen the adoption of an increasingly belligerent stance towards Iraq on the parts of the US and the UK in particular, signalling a shift from the policy of containment that has been in place since the last Gulf War, and towards a more aggressive policy. As yet, it is unclear...

The ‘central’ forecasts presented in this report assume that a diplomatic solution is found to the situation in Iraq and so a war is avoided. The Foreign Secretary recently put the odds of such an outcome at 60/40. However, given the build-up of troops in the Middle East and recent hardening...