Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the United States against the conjoined threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony
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Paper Summary Section 1 Violence has always been intrinsic to state formation, especially where state structures are transplanted and imposed by colonial and imperial power. Yet even by i these standards, violence has been particularly prominent in Iraq. Indeed, the history of Iraq from its establishment under British mandatory rule in 1921 until at least th
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Two decades after the US invasion of Iraq, the civil war of the years that followed and the ravages of the Islamic State have faded into the background. Yet the country remains shaken by internal cleavages, torn apart by corruption, and vulnerable to influence operations by external actors. Overcoming economic crisis and infrastructural shortcomings could contribute to greater
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As a result, Washington policymakers barreled in 20 years ago with no real awareness of what would happen. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, we should reflect on what lessons the United States may have gleaned from the experience and whether such lessons will deter any future military operations to effect regime change. By all accounts, the invasio
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Introduction At no time since the founding of the modern nation of Iraq in 1921 hasthe country faced a greater set of deep-seated and intractable challengesto its fragile state–society relations. In June 2014 the Sunni Arab terror-ist network known in English as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)conducted a series of highly coordinated and brazen attacks across part
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