This report is a product of the U.S. Institute of Peace¿s Iraq Experience Project. It is the third of three reports examining important lessons identified in Iraq prior to the country¿s transition to sovereignty in June 2004 and is based on extensive interviews with 113 officials, soldiers, and contractors who served there. This report is focused specifically on governance in Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority. The other two reports examine security and reconstruction, respectively. These reports are intended for use as training aids in programs that prepare individuals for service in peace and stability operations, so that lessons identified in Iraq may be translated into lessons learned by those assigned to future missions.

Focuses on the activities of the Coalition Provisional Authority during the first year of the occupation of Iraq. Based on interviews and nearly 100,000 never-before-released documents from CPA archives, the book recounts and evaluates the efforts of the United States and its coalition partners to restore public services, counter a burgeoning insurgency, and create the basis for representative government.

Was the Iraq war really about oil? As a senior oil advisor for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and briefly as minister of oil, Gary Vogler thought he knew. But while doing research for a book about his experience in Iraq, Vogler discovered that what he knew was not the whole story—or even the true story. The Iraq war did have an oil agenda underlying it, one that Vogler had previously denied. This book is his attempt to set the record straight. Iraq and the Politics of Oil is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the role of the US government in the Iraqi oil sector since 2003. Vogler describes the prewar oil planning and the important decisions made during hostilities to get Iraqi oil flowing several months ahead of schedule. He reveals how, amid the instability of 2006 (largely fueled by the arrogance of early US decisions), the fixing of the Bayji Refinery contributed significantly to the success of the oil sector in the Sunni part of northern Iraq during and after the surge. Vogler gives us an expert insider’s view of the largest oilfield auctions in the history of the international oil industry, and his account shows how US Forces’ focus on a single Iraqi point of failure in 2007 was a primary factor in the record productions and exports of 2012 through 2017. But under the successes so deftly chronicled here, a darker political narrative finally emerges, one that reaches back to the decision to go to war with Iraq. Uncovering it, Vogler revises our understanding of what we were doing in Iraq, even as he gives us a critical, close-up view of that fraught enterprise.