Forty-five Minutes that Changed the World: The September Dossier, British Drama, and the New Journalism

On September 24, 2002, Tony Blair's government released a dossier with exaggerate claims regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities. The September Dossier would become a cornerstone of Blair's case for war in Iraq, while the arguments against the claims—and their use in government and media—also became regular features in British drama. Through an examination of Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, David Hare's Stuff Happens, and Colin Teevan's How Many Miles to Basra?, this article explores the critique of media and government in contemporary British theater that engages pre-Iraq war intelligence. This analysis of three genres of Iraq War drama—a verbatim play, a docudrama, and a fictional play—examines the challenges to the intersection of art and journalism. Specifically, it appears that British theater, while providing a more critical venue for analyzing the narration of the Iraq War, became a parallel monolith for a singular narrative of the war that did not create a sufficient replacement for a reliable and rigorous press.