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Warfare in Iraq since the 2003 invasion: The diffusion of the projection of political violence

Ibrahim Al-Marashi

While the US sought to create an Iraqi army to serve as the institution that holds the monopoly on the use of legitimate force in Iraq, such a Weberian rubric has proved elusive. Rather, an oligopoly on violence, characterised by hybridity and plurality, represents a decentralisation of warmaking and warfare in Iraq’s security sector since 2003. This article primarily focuses on the organisations and institutions responsible for warmaking in Iraq in light of the American decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces and concludes with what this transformation means for methods of projecting war, by both Iraqi actors and the US.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Associate Professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos and an advisory board member of the International Security and Conflict Resolution programme at San Diego State University. He obtained his doctorate in Modern History at University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, part of which was plagiarised by the British government prior to the 2003 Iraq War, otherwise known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), The Modern History of Iraq (Routledge 2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2018).

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Post-invasion Iraq: An impossible task, poorly executed

Marina Ottaway

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime and to replace it with one based on democracy. The regime was defeated quickly, but twenty years later it is clear that the United States has failed to re-engineer Iraq into a democratic country. This is not surprising because the occupation was poorly planned and executed. More fundamentally, however, it failed because nation-building, that is the deliberate re-engineering of a society, is an impossible task even authoritarian regimes have failed to accomplish.

Marina Ottaway is a Middle East Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a long-time analyst of political transformations in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. She is working on a project at the Wilson Center about the countries of the Arab Spring and Iraq, having joined after 14 years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she played a central role in launching the Middle East Program. Prior to that, she carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East for many years and taught at Georgetown University, the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, the American University in Cairo, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the University of Zambia and Addis Ababa University. Her extensive research experience is reflected in her publications, which include nine authored books and six edited ones. Her most recent include Getting to Pluralism, co-authored with Amr Hamzawy, and Yemen on the Brink, co-edited with Christopher Boucek. While at Carnegie, she supervised its Guide to Egypt’s Transition, a website that provides background and analysis on issues that will shape Egypt’s political future, and Iraqi Elections 2010, an online guide to Iraqi politics. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

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Political economy of modernisation in Iraq: Challenges and consequences

Ebrahim Abbassi, Adel Nemati and Mohsen Shokri

Post-Saddam American modernisation in Iraq, which was supposed to implement an example of a new Middle East based on the liberal democracy model in this country, effectively led to the establishment of a weak elected government against anti-modernisation forces after 2003. The formation of this government and the cessation of modernisation led to the tendency of socially disillusioned Iraqi forces to experience the defeat of Iraqi democracy facing with discourse of ISIS or the victory of pro-traditional forces (Al-Ketletol Sadriyah) in 2021 elections. The answer to the main question of this article, which is the reason for the failure of American nation-building in Iraq, should be found in three factors: "the nature of the fundamental history of Iraq in the modern order," "the historical nature of American nation-building policy after World War II," and "the hybrid nature of the Islamic religious state or traditional classes discourse, which was able to establish itself as a liberating force among the disenfranchised social forces in post-2003 Iraq." The result of this process was the cessation of modernisation and modern nation-building in Iraq. This article examines the reasons for the failure of these projects in Iraq by examining three models of modernisation: "modernisation from above or British colonial modernisation" in monarchial regimes; "army-centred" modernisation, which resulted from a military coup and the Ba'ath party; and "American liberal democracy modernisation".

Ebrahim Abbassi is Associate Professor in political sciences at Shiraz University. He holds a BA (1998), an MA (2001) and a PhD (2009) in Political Science from University of Tehran. He has been Director of the Persian Gulf Center for Strategic Studies (2013-2016) and Dean of the School of law and Political Sciences at Shiraz University (2018-2022). His current research interests include political and social developments in Iran, Persian Gulf studies and terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Adel Nemati is a PhD student. in Political Sciences at Shiraz University. His research focuses on the history of Iran and the Middle East.

Mohsen Shokri is a PhD student in Political Sciences at Shiraz University. His research focuses on the political economy of the Middle East.

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Re-imagining Babylon: Epistemic violence and Iraqi discourse

Ruba Ali Al-Hassani

For two decades, White people have been dominating English-language literature and discourse on Iraq, Orientalising, dehistoricising and sectarianising it. White men in government, non-government think-tanks and academia expect to lead the conversation instead of humbling themselves to pluralistic Iraqi voices. Despite effort by some Iraqis in the diaspora to guide the conversation, it is geared back to a dominating West-centric perspective. Iraqis are marginalised and Iraqi women are tokenised. Iraqi women academics are especially excluded from the conversation. So much so that a nascent Iraqi Women Academics Network now draws attention to the pluralistic voices and experiences of Iraqi women scholars. When Iraq’s October Spring emerged in 2019, I was part of a small network of Iraqi bloggers who shared instant, verified news of the protests to foreign journalists to ensure Iraqis’ voices and stories reached a global audience. Western media covered the protest movement and focused on Iraqi voices. Within a year, those journalists became Iraq experts, invited to speak on think tank panels discussing Iraq. The only Iraqi women invited to speak were presumed to represent a monolithic idea of what Iraqi women think. Iraqi women experts of minoritised ethnoconfessional backgrounds continue to be overlooked. While European and Western subjectivities are often interpreted as global objectivity, this has become more obvious in the Iraqi context. Two decades after the invasion, Western journalists and analysts continue to discuss Iraqis’ stories on their behalf, and their experiences are deemed objective reflections on Iraqis’ lived experiences. In my paper, I discuss my experience and analyse what went wrong by discussing how White Ignorance has been useful in upholding the epistemic violence that sits at the core of media coverage and policy analysis of Iraq. I also borrow from the counterfactual method to expose "blind spots" and contingencies in Iraq epistemology that extend the Iraq invasion’s violence. This paper invites the reader to imagine how different things could have been and how much richer Iraq discourse would have been had it included Iraqi women academics’ pluralistic voices and scholarly contributions.

Ruba Ali Al-Hassani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at lancaster University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion, and a Research Consultant with King's College london. An interdisciplinary sociologist, she focuses on state-society relations & social movements in Iraq, law & social control, and transitional justice & collective trauma. She co-founded the Canadian Association for Muslim Women in law and the Iraqi Women Academics Network, and has taught at York University and Trent University, Canada. Ruba holds a B.Sc. in Psychology & Sociology, a M.A. in Criminology, an ll.M. in transitional justice, and a forthcoming PhD in law.

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The Journal for politics, economics, and culture of the Middle East published by the German Orient-Institute

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ORIENT III 2023: The invasion of Iraq: 20 years on

ORIENT II 2023: Changing international relations of the GCC states

ORIENT I 2023: Climate change and climate action in MENA

ORIENT IV 2022: Global geopolitics echoing into the MENA region

ORIENT III 2022: Intraregional geopolitics

ORIENT II 2022: Germany’s role in the MENA region: Between continuity and change

Warfare in Iraq since the 2003 invasion: The diffusion of the projection of political violence

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Post-invasion Iraq: An impossible task, poorly executed

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The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq and the logic of intervention

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Political economy of modernisation in Iraq: Challenges and consequences

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The post-2003 ruling political elite circle in Iraq vs. its challengers: Differences in their support bases and electoral strategies

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Re-imagining Babylon: Epistemic violence and Iraqi discourse

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Dawn of a new beginning: Iraq looks East in the post-Saddam era

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