How the U.S. intervention is reshaping the world.

When the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it expected to be able to establish a prosperous liberal democracy with an open economy that would serve as a key ally in the region. It sought to engage Iraqi society in ways that would defeat any challenge to that state building project and U.S. guidance of it. Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala argue that state building in Iraq has been crippled less by preexisting weaknesses in the Iraqi state, Iraqi sectarian divisions or U.S. policy mistakes than by the fact that the US has attempted-with only limited success-to control the parameters and outcome of that process. They explain that the very nature of U.S. state-building in Iraq has created incentives for unregulated local power struggles and patron-client relations. Corruption, smuggling, and violence have resulted. The main legacy of the US-led occupation, the authors contend, is that Iraq has become a fragmented state-that is, one in which actors dispute where overall political authority lies and in which there are no agreed procedures for resolving such disputes. As long as this is the case, the authority of the state will remain limited. Technocratic mechanisms such as training schemes for officials, political fixes such as elections, and the coercive tools of repression will not be able to overcome this situation. Placing the occupation within the context of regional, global, and U.S. politics, Herring and Rangwala demonstrate how the politics of co-option, coercion, and economic change have transformed the lives and allegiances of the Iraqi population. As uncertainty about the future of Iraq persists, this volume provides a much-needed analysis of the deeper forces that give meaning to the daily events in Iraq.

Michael Schwartz gets behind the headlines, revealing the real dynamics of the Iraq debacle and its legacy.

How does the Iraq War affect the future world order? What kinds of problems has this war brought about, and what is needed to remedy these problems, so as to reconstruct an order in Iraq and beyond? The present volume is a collection of essays exploring these issues, written by leading scholars in their respective fields. Importantly, the Iraq War has caused numerous long-term security and economic problems in Iraq (Chapter 1) and in the Middle East (Chapter 2). In addition, this war represents a failure of the Western liberals' project of establishing a liberal market democracy, and these liberals are likely to repeat the same error elsewhere in the future (Chapter 3). Moreover, the war underlines the crisis in global governance today, but the idea of reforming the United Nations has some serious limitations (Chapter 4). With regard to the issue of terrorism, ?Al-Qaeda in Iraq? has been operating in the field for some time, and thus Iraq will likely remain an important global center of terrorism in the foreseeable future (Chapter 5).

"This book contributes significantly ot the conversation seeking to understand the international forces at play in the threatening war on Iraq." —Nelson Mandela "Behind the Invasion of Iraq . . .synthesizes the seemingly disparate threads of the U.S. war drive in a blistering indictment of American foreign policy . . .The effect is of puzzle pieces clicking into place." —Counterpunch Since September 11, 2001, there have been many accounts of the ways in which the alignment of global power is changing or will be changed by the U.S.'s "war on terrorism." Most of them take as their starting point the options facing the wealthy and powerful nations of the world seeking to control an ever larger share of the world's resources. Behind the Invasion of Iraq is written from a different perspective, and one that makes possible a far more comprehensive point of view. Its authors, Research Unit for Political Economy, are rooted in the politics of a Third World country—India—which has long been on the receiving end of imperialist power. As a consequence, they have a more sober view of the workings of global power. In clear and accessible prose, weighing the evidence carefully and tracing events to their root causes, they move beyond moral outrage to a clear view of the process being set in motion by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. They show that the invasion of Iraq is a desperate gamble by a section of the U.S. ruling elite to preserve their power, driven by the wish to stave off economic crisis through military means. Their efforts will not end with Iraq, but will require the recolonization of the middle East. Behind the Invasion of Iraq exposes the idea that war will bring democracy to the Middle East as so much propaganda. In a context where so many rulers are themselves clients of the United States, the war is aimed not at the rulers but at the masses of ordinary people whose hostility to imperialism has not been broken even by corrupt and autocratic rulers. This book describes the remaking of global power with a truly global awareness of what is at stake.