Existing scholarship has generally examined international law in public debates for how it helps to explain other phenomena, in particular decision-making by governments. This book gives a different account of international law in public debates by investigating the uses of that language for what it can tell us about the development of international law itself. I argue that there has been a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state actions. This move is a central characteristic of a popular international law that I attempt to unravel in this book. This chapter presents the first step in that unravelling by describing two events that arose out of the 2003 Iraq War: the release of the Report of Iraq Inquiry in the UK and the outcomes of the World Tribunal on Iraq.