Consequences

The Consequences of Forced State
Failure in Iraq
ANDREW FLIBBERT
THE WAR IS OVER, but a broad understanding of the American
experience in Iraq remains elusive. After taking the country by force in
2003, the United States disbanded the Iraqi military, dismantled its
bureaucracy, transformed its legal system, and replaced its leadership from
top to bottom. The result was a brutal and multiheaded insurgency,
ongoing terrorism, economic stagnation, crumbling infrastructure, rampant criminality, sectarian and ethnic polarization, and lowgrade civil war.
Why was Iraq so difficult to govern in the aftermath of the American
invasion of 2003, and why did political life fall apart so fully and so quickly?
Why did Iraqs new political leaders have such trouble reasserting
themselves, and why did a reversal of downward trends begin in 2008?
Will an independent Iraq hold together in the future, and what are the
implications for American engagement in the region and beyond?
Answers to these questions will help to explain why U.S. involvement in
Iraq itself was puzzling in seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand,
Iraqs insurgency and near collapse between mid2003 and late 2007
surprised the George W. Bush administration and its supporters,
confounding predictions of an easy military victory and a smooth transition
to democracy. The initial war was won in about six weeks, but the peace was
lost soon thereafter. The human toll alone was enormous, with over 4,400
American dead and 32,000 wounded, in addition to more than 100,000
ANDREW FLIBBERT is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and is

currently working on a booklength manuscript on the Iraq war.
POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 128 Number 1 2013 | www.psqonline.org
2013 Academy of Political Science
67
68 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
documented Iraqi civilian deaths from 2003 to 2011.1 Eventual improvements in Iraqi security and stability, on the other hand, surprised war
critics, who were unable to explain the apparent success of the surge or
the significant drop in attacks and casualties. Iraq did not spiral fully out of
control, and it did begin to edge toward recovery. In this sense, prowar
optimists and antiwar pessimists alike seemed confounded by the long
train of events, inasmuch as neither diagnosed correctly the underlying
nature of the problem or understood the logic of potential solutions.
This article uses insights from institutional and ideational theory to
explain the early failures, later successes, and ongoing dilemmas of the
American engagement in Iraq. I claim that the same ideas that led to the
war also determined the shape of the peace, or lack thereof, in subsequent
years. I argue that most of the pathologies in Iraqi political life since 2003,
from sectarian mobilization to insurgent violence, are best understood as
consequences of state weakness and failure. I contend, moreover, that Iraqs
violence and insecurity reflected externally driven state failure more than
internally resurgent ethnic and sectarian cleavages, as the conventional
wisdom has asserted. Unlike accounts that treat social division as natural
and deeprooted, I focus on the international ideas, actions, and inactions
that shaped domestic political outcomes in fundamental and underappreciated ways. The coercion and near collapse of the Iraqi second image by
the Americanled third had exceptional consequences that demand full
and careful consideration.2
In the Iraqi case, international actors, led by the United States, were
largely responsible for an array of dramatic and sweeping domestic failures.
The short, regimeending war in March and April 2003 was directed at
Saddam Hussein and his military, but the postwar dismantling of the Iraqi
state presumed the relative insignificance of state power and authority. This
was both by design, in the Bush administrations decision to eliminate
instruments of oppression like the Iraqi military, and by ideologically
prompted inattention, in the discarding of workinglevel Baathist
bureaucrats, police, and other instruments of organized authority. The
United States had trouble restoring security and stability because it had
precipitated the virtual collapse of the Iraqi state by undermining its
1
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, accessed at http://icasualties.org/, 15 February 2013; Operation Iraqi
Freedom (OIF) U.S. Casualty Status (December 23, 2011), accessed at http://www.defense.gov/news/
casualty.pdf, 15 February 2013; and Iraq Body Count, accessed at http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/,
15 February 2013.
2
Second image refers here to Waltzs original referentthe internal structure of statesas much as
domesticlevel societal actors. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 80.
STATE FAILURE AND IRAQ | 69
coercive, administrative, legal, and extractive institutions. Without

minimally functioning state institutions, domestic governance became all
but impossible until new thinking and associated statebuilding policies
came to the fore.
The underlying problem of forced state failure led to a host of difficulties
long after Saddam Hussein and his regime had been deposed. As a direct
consequence of the condition, most Iraqis turned for protection to
mobilized sectarian and ethnic militias, the largest and mostsalient
domestic social aggregates available for military or defensive use. This turn
made it much harder for American authorities and, in time, the Iraqi
government to reconstitute a viable national state and work toward a
reconciled national community. The United States achieved a measure of
stability in late 2007 by making an assortment of local, decentralized
politicalmilitary deals with various armed groups in Iraq. It bought the
peace for a time by shifting the calculus of Sunni insurgents and cultivating
the support of tribesmen from the Awakening movement. These deals were
temporary, however, and were no substitute for longterm efforts by the
Iraqi government to rebuild a fragile state.
While a great many Iraqis have reason to be profoundly skeptical
about the Iraqi state, reversing state failure at the national level is
essential to achieving more lasting security, stability, and peace. No
other governance structure, whether locally or globally oriented, is likely
to suffice, and therein lies the dilemma. Iraq today needs a triple
transition: a rebuilt state to hold political life together and solve
collective problems, substantial democratic development to prevent
oppression and defend rights, and the advance of regional peace to keep
systemic pressures from driving everything else apart. And it needs all of
this at essentially the same time. This is a tall orderindeed, the work of
a generation. Halfmeasures in any crucial domain, along with the
tension between domestic and international imperatives, may undermine the entire project.
The article proceeds as follows. In the first part, having summarized the
arguments application to Iraq, I elaborate the conceptual and political
origins of the idea of state failure, discuss its internal dynamics, and
highlight the externally imposed variety that has become prominent in the
past two decades. In the second part, I use the notion of state failure to
reframe and illuminate the problem as it has unfolded in Iraq. To do so, I
describe briefly the rise, fall, and partial return of the Iraqi state,
emphasizing international and ideational factors while teasing out how
the war led to state failure by eliminating administrative capabilities,
institutional legitimacy, and the security apparatus. Finally, I conclude with
a brief discussion of policy implications for the United States, including

ongoing debates over Iraq and, by extension, Afghanistan. I note the close
connections between state failure and international security, but stress the
ways in which security on all levels requires careful attention to the domestic
consequences of international actions.
STATE FAILURE: CONCEPTUAL AND POLITICAL LINEAGE
The notion of state failure rose to prominence with the end of the Cold
War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of Yugoslavia
two decades ago. The idea originated in economic scholarship on
bureaucratic rentseeking and corruption in the 1970s, contrasted with
the moreestablished concept of market failure.3 Applied to the political
domain in the early 1990s, it acquired a broader, morevaried, and
contested usage. Most contemporary theorists have come to use the term
to describe a states inability to perform a range of vital state activities,
especially in the areas of security, administration, and territorial control.
It is a structural political condition, making it inherently difficult to
remedy. Disagreement exists as to whether it describes specific areas of
state dysfunction or if it should be reserved for wholesale, systemic
institutional failure. Partly in response, analysts have developed allied
concepts and alternative formulations to distinguish state failure from
state weakness, fragility, crisis, collapse, death, and other political
deficiencies.4
Paradoxically, just when the problem of state failure made its way onto
the world stage, the state as a unified set of institutions seemed to make its
way off. In the globalizing era of the 1990s, the state became conspicuous in
its absencetheoretically, empirically, and normatively. Having brought
the state back in in the 1980s, comparative theorists retreated from
considering it a single entity, while policymakers lamented its declining
regulative capacity, pundits declared its demise, and critics scorned its
Jonathan Di John attributes the term to Ann Krueger. Di John, Conceptualising the Causes and
Consequences of Failed States: A Critical Review of the Literature, Crisis States Working Papers Series No. 2,
working paper no. 25, January 2008; Ann Krueger, The Political Economy of RentSeeking Society,
American Economic Review 64 (June 1974): 291303.
4
Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Joshua B. Forrest, Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil
Society in GuineaBissau (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Kenneth John Menkhaus, Somalia: State
Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press/International Institute for
Strategic Studies, 2004); and I. William Zartman, ed., Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration
of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995). For theoretically informed case studies, see
Robert I. Rotberg, ed., State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2003). An early account is Robert H. Jackson, QuasiStates: Sovereignty, International
Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3
contributions to achieving socially desirable objectives.5 Accompanying the

ascendance of the United States as the worlds only superpower was a
heightened sense that a liberal, Americanstyle, lowprofile, domestically
minimalist state had won the day. This vision informed many of the leading theoretical perspectives in the discipline, including various forms of
new institutionalism and the move toward finding the microfoundations
of political choice.6 While realists and some liberal institutionalists in
international relations (IR) theory continued to abide by the fictional but
useful notion of the state as unitary actor, comparativists tended to
unbundle and disaggregate it, while highlighting its historical specificity as
an institutional form.7
At the same time, diminished interest in the state as a whole
was accompanied by rising domesticlevel violence in a number of places
worldwide. Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s was
followed by a modest, postCold War American retrenchment from some of
its global commitments. The reduction in resources available to client and
peripheral states came at a time of lessening international attention to
domestic conflict. The shift was most pronounced in the ethnic and sectarian
upheavals of postcolonial Asia and Africa.8 Rwandas assiduously
constructed ethnic divide exploded in 1994, eliciting studied indifference
by the United States.9 Neighboring Zaires warinduced state collapse led to
unprecedented regional violence shortly thereafter in circumstances that the
United States and the Soviet Union would not have permitted in earlier
decades. The Middle East, for its part, had several cases of state failure and
distorted development in which external factors played pivotal roles,
including in Yemen (reduced labor remittances), Lebanon (Palestinian
migration; Israeli and Syrian intervention), Sudan (British colonial impact),
and Iraq (American involvement). Not by coincidence, the United States and
other powerful international actors distanced themselves from these same
hapless states.
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gabriel Almond, The Return to the State, American Political
Science Review 82 (September 1988): 853874. Critiques of the modernist state include James C. Scott,
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998).
6
R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert Rockman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
7
On institutional isomorphism, see Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of
Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
8
Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2005.
9
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2003),
329389.
While rising globalization and the end of the Cold War were hailed in the
United States, state weakness and sporadic failure gradually became critical
policy concerns. In the transformed political lexicon of the time, failed
states replaced rogue states. The latter formulation was a political
pejorative of the 1990s, with little conceptual content despite its
effectiveness in isolating American adversaries like Libya, Iran, and Syria.
Fears about state failure, in contrast, reflected a trend in diminished state
institutional capacity along multiple dimensions: state authorities in a
range of places struggled to control territory and monopolize force in facing
ethnic and nationalist insurgencies; state bureaucratic capacity fell in
tandem with reduced revenue from taxes and the smallerisbetter
ideological orientation of neoliberalism; and state subsidies to promote
economic wellbeing and equity in the developing world shrank due to
internationally mandated structural adjustment. In this sense, globalizations systemic economic pressure combined with heightened attention
to the weakened and fragmented nature of state authority throughout the
world.10
After September 11, pseudoscientific indices and rankings tracked
state failure in its various forms and degrees.11 Echoing the rising
prominence of the concept in policy circles, the U.S. Defense Department
made doctrinal and organizational changes to facilitate military
operations in environments of state failure and what came to be called
ungoverned territories, spaces, or areas.12 A narrative emerged depicting
Afghanistans predicament as an unfortunate legacy of benign American
10
At the request of Vice President Gore, the Central Intelligence Agency established a State Failure Task
Force in 1994. Early findings are in Daniel C. Esty, Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Pamela T. Surko, and
Alan N. Unger, Working Papers: State Failure Task Force Report (McLean, VA: Science Applications
International Corporation, 1995); and Daniel C. Esty, Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Pamela T. Surko,
Alan N. Unger, and Robert S. Chen, The State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings (McLean, VA:
Science Applications International Corporation, 1998). See also Gary King and Langche Zeng, Improving
Forecasts of State Failure, World Politics 53 (July 2001): 623658.
11
Foreign Policys Failed States Index, accessed at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id4350&print1, 15 February 2013; and LSEs Crisis States Research Center, <http://www.crisisstates.
com/>. A critique is Saskia Sassen and Razi Ahmed, What Is State Failure? accessed at Dissent, 21
July 2010, <www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id369>.
12
U.S. Army Field Manual No. 10023, Peace Operations (Washington, DC: Department of the Army,
December 1994). On areas within states beyond their authority, see the RAND monograph written for
the U.S. Air Force: Angel Rabasa, Steven Boraz, Peter Chalk, Kim Cragin, Theodore W. Karasik, Jennifer D.
P. Moroney, Kevin A. OBrien, and John E. Peters, Ungoverned Territories: Understanding and Reducing
Terrorism Risks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2007). In 2007, the Department of Defense created a new
Combatant Command, AFRICOM, to contend with state failure in Africa and to promote a stable and secure
African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy. Accessed at http://www.africom.mil/AboutAFRICOM.asp, 2 May 2012. See also, Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas, eds., Ungoverned Spaces:
Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010).
neglect after the Soviet withdrawal, rather than deeper, historically

rooted problems.13 The September 11 plot was said to have been hatched
by an opportunistic al Qaeda, which took advantage of Afghan weakness
and social division.14 A primordial view of ethnic, religious, and
nationalist conflict framed the political travails of Afghanistan, Somalia,
and elsewhere as that of weak governments unable to keep a lid on
naturally rising internal tensions.15 The direct roles of international
systemic influences and external actors like the United States were
minimized or ignored.16
CAUSES OF STATE FAILURE: INTERNAL DYNAMICS
While recognizing that state failure is not insulated from the international
political currents of the day, theorists have tended to approach its etiology
from the standpoint of domestic internal causes, with Robert Bates defining
state failure as a kind of implosion and a loss of control over key aspects of
domestic governance.17 They have put domestic politics at the center,
consistent with a prevailing, Weberianinspired assumption that states fail
when they lose their monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a
territory.18 In so doing, they have emphasized the ways in which state
institutions underperform, atrophy, and collapse under the weight of
13
Historical and broadgauged accounts include Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of
Afghanistan, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); and Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistans
Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2001).
14
The 2002 National Security Strategy stated, America is now threatened less by conquering states than by
failing ones. Accessed at <http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/>, 15 February 2013. It is not clear that al Qaeda needed Afghanistan for the plot, though some observers claimed
the direct and indirect value of the Afghan sanctuary to al Qaeda in preparing the 9/11 attack and other
operations. The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton, n.d.), 366.
15
This view was popularized by Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold
War (New York: Random House, 2000).
16
A morefavorable interpretation of the American role is James Dobbins, et al., Americas Role in Nation
Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003). Coalition Provisional Authority head L.
Paul Bremer endorses it as follows: Jim Dobbins and his team have produced a marvelous how to manual
for postconflict stabilization and reconstruction. I have kept a copy handy for ready consultation since my
arrival in Baghdad and recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand or engage in such activities.
17
Robert Bates, State Failure, Annual Review of Political Science 11 (June 2008): 2. Cf. David A. Reilly, The
TwoLevel Game of Failing States: Internal and External Sources of State Failure, Journal of Conflict
Studies 28 (2008), 1732.
18
For Bates, one of the leading attributes of a failed state is its loss of monopoly over the means of coercion.
(Bates, State Failure, 2.) For Michael Ignatieff, the states incapacity to control the means of violence is the
distinguishing feature of state failure. (Michael Ignatieff, Intervention and State Failure, Dissent 49
(Winter 2002): 118.) See also Robert Rotberg, ed., When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jennifer Milliken, ed., State Failure, Collapse & Reconstruction
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003); and David Carment, Assessing State Failure: Implications for Theory
and Policy, Third World Quarterly 24 (June 2003): 407427.
domestic conflict. Echoing the terms economic origins, some of these

accounts privilege conflicts over natural resources or environmental scarcity
and degradation, problems that make it difficult for weak or fragile states to
function effectively compared with better endowed states.19 Others
emphasize internal governance problems associated with ethnic conflict,
democratization, or a local propensity for insurgency, whether in response
to prior grievances or driven by greed and the struggle for power, all of
which prompt or accelerate state institutional collapse.20 While varying in
emphasis, theorists have noted that domestic conflict challenges the state in
three particular areaslegitimacy, security, and administrationcreating
conditions that make failure more likely.
A focus on weakened legitimacy highlights the abusive nature of the
state and treats societal violence as a reaction to state deficiency in
accommodating key social actors and meeting basic societal needs.
Political violence is conceptualized as a response to systemic injustice,
widespread corruption, or relative deprivation. The principal remedy
includes the creation of democratic institutions at the state level and the
growth of civil society, the assumption being that the state has to be
redesigned to better serve society and reacquire internal legitimacy.
International actors, according to this view, are most significant in their
capacity to enhance state legitimacy by training locals to apply
international standards and practices, enlisting international institutions
to provide development assistance, and strengthening civil society. They
also can promote democracy on the ground by their support for non
violent groups and national reconciliation. In so doing, international
actors may help to strengthen state legitimacy, though they cannot assure
it (Table 1).
An emphasis on the problem of security, in turn, reflects the directly
detrimental impact of domestic political violence. Even if states fail in other
activities, such as economic management or political representation, the
control over violence and the provision of physical security figure
prominently in many accounts. In this sense, localized violence is
conceptualized as a central cause of state failure, especially when it occurs
between ethnic groups, including in the highprofile cases of subSaharan
19
Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in LateCentury Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); Thomas F. HomerDixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999); and George Klay Kieh, ed., Beyond State Failure and Collapse: Making the
State Relevant in Africa (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
20
An alternative, economic assessment is Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner, Beyond Greed
and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War, Oxford Economic Papers 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 127.

TABLE 1
Domestic Origins and International Responses to State Failure
Domestic Problem
Legitimacy
Security
Administration
Structural Deficiency
International Responses
Provision of collective goods or basic needs

Accommodation of social groups
Development assistance
Democracy promotion
Support for national reconciliation
Use of force
Military assistance
Regional peace
Capacity-building (training, reconstruction)
Control over means of violence
Policy implementation
Africa.21 Rather than addressing the underlying reasons for social upheaval,
attention to security often treats domestic violence as inherent to certain
communities, revealing primordial and essentialist views of the violence
proneness of these societies. The implicit assumption is that hostility
among social groups is longstanding and deeply engrained, with tension
being natural to particular contexts. State failure is deemed largely
inevitable in these cases, though the precise point at which internal tensions
lead to state failure typically is either unspecified or stipulated after the fact.
International actors are seen as a potential remedy to security problems,
bolstering local police and military forces or intervening more fully if
necessary to create stability, which is presumed to be a prerequisite for
effective rule.22
A third and sometimes overlooked domesticlevel focus is state
administration, highlighting the deficiency of national institutions more
than the persistence of unregulated violence. Conceptually, analyzing
administrative failure presupposes a disaggregated view of the state, parsed
into its various ministries, agencies, regulatory structures, and bureaucratic
entities, each with its respective rules, personnel, and physical infrastructure. Not an abstract, reified entity, the state is considered a set of formal
and informal institutions with some degree of structural capacity to
implement core government policies. To remedy administrative failure is to
Bates, When Things Fell Apart; and Marta ReynalQuerol, Ethnicity, Political Systems, and Civil Wars,
Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (February 2002), 2954. Data on civil war have even been used as a proxy
for failing states. James Fearon and David Laitin, Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War, American Political
Science Review 97 (February 2003): 7590.
22
On whether order is a prerequisite for good governance, see Mark Kesselman, Order or Movement? The
Literature of Political Development as Ideology, World Politics 26 (October 1973): 139154. The conceptual
place of violence in this perspective conflates state failure with its consequences: states fail when they prove
incapable of acting in ways consistent with dominant and historically contingent expectations of statehood.
This amounts to a tautology and assumes that state performance ranges along a neat continuum, with a clear
endpoint of failure and a seemingly obvious tipping point indicating when such failure occurs.
21
rebuild the state apparatus in all its dimensions. International actors, from
this perspective, are viewed as potential contributors to national
administrative capacity by undertaking training and reconstruction efforts
in the state domain.
In general, state failure is most likely when the problems of legitimacy,
security, and administration compound one another. Problems in a single
area are unlikely to bring about a failure of the whole. Weak legitimacy does
not necessarily lead to state collapse, even if leaders govern unresponsively
or are pressured from within or without to liberalize or democratize. Poor
security provision does not automatically induce failure, even if a state is
unable to prevent political violence, insurgency, or crime. Administrative
deficiency alone is not fatal, even if a state is incapable of implementing key
policies. Together, however, when serious problems of legitimacy, security,
and administration are evident simultaneously, failure is much more likely.
As with other complex social phenomena, there are multiple specific paths
to the same outcome. But in general, when legitimacy, security, and
administration deteriorate in any substantial combination, state prospects
become grim.
STATE FAILURES EXTERNAL ORIGINS
The variable paths and dimensions of failure notwithstanding, international actors typically have been conceptualized as benign or even
benevolent potential solutions to statelevel shortcomings rather than as
problems in themselves, or causally prior sources of the difficulties states
face. Despite an extensive body of research on the international sources of
domestic politics, little direct and explicit attention has been paid to the
external origins of many instances of state failure.23 This inattention may
reflect differences in the subfields, with IR scholars privileging
international variables and comparativists assuming the primacy of
internal causes. It also may emanate from subtle or implicit assumptions
about the inevitability of failure for states embedded in particular cultural
and regional contexts. Even if external factors play a role, analysts
frequently deem them less important to states internally primed for
problems.
An emphasis on external international factors, in contrast, mirrors the
longestablished work of theorists in other areas of state activity, who have
conceptualized the international level of analysis as more than an incidental
Originally, Peter Gourevitch, The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic
Politics, International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978): 881912.
23
trigger or a secondary influence on domestic actors.24 In a globalizing

world, where international and domestic politics are increasingly
connected, external factors inevitably shape the likelihood of state failure.
At least some of the political, social, and economic indicators of a states
domestic vulnerability are sometimes externally derived. International
pressures work through the same domestic mechanisms of failure explored
by comparative theorists: legitimacy, security, and administration. But in
many instances, the fundamental impetus originates beyond state borders.
Just as international actors have supported and affirmed the sovereign
rights of state authorities since Westphalia, they also have played
noteworthy roles in bringing about state failure in some cases. These cases
have risen to prominence in recent years, particularly as failed states have
become entangled in international conflict.
In all such cases, international actors create or exacerbate domestic
problems of state legitimacy, security, and administration. External actors
may compromise a states legitimacy by reducing the states capacity to
provide collective goods or meet the needs of major social groups. This can
occur regardless of regime type or historical period. European colonial
powers, for example, undermined postcolonial state legitimacy decades
ago by cultivating social divisions that made later governance more difficult.
External actors may weaken domestic security by limiting the states
capacity to exercise authority in the face of social upheaval. While
occupation provides an extreme example, foreign military assistance to one
side in an internal conflict may perpetuate political violence. Finally,
external actors may undermine domestic administration by weakening
state capacity to implement its policies more generally. State administrative
capacity may even atrophy or remain undeveloped under the influence of
international economic relations that inhibit institutional change.25
Many of these possibilities are evident in the mostprominent
contemporary cases of state failure, even if the dominant accounts of their
various pathologies remain centered on domesticlevel problems. Close
attention to the Iraqi case illuminates the example and demonstrates the
logic and significance of forced state failure (Figure 1).
24
This includes the study of political change, such as revolution and democratization. Democratic contagion
and regional influence have long been part of the democratization literature. On revolution, see Theda
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
25
The literature on the rentier state is vast, but rentier effects on state institutions might come from natural
resources as well as strategic position or any other source of external rents.

FIGURE 1
External Origins of State Failure and Its Consequences
IRAQ AND THE HUMPTY-DUMPTY STATE

State failure matters because some things, once broken, cannot easily be
fixed. Once the Iraqi state fell like HumptyDumpty off the wallpushed,
in fact, by American interventionit shattered into many pieces and could
not be put back together without years of effort and exceptional human and
material cost. This simple insight, echoed in a ninteenthcentury English
nursery rhyme, speaks volumes about the problems that Iraq and the
United States have experienced since 2003. Externally induced state failure
has no rapid, lowcost remedy because states are easier to break than to
make, even for the dominant actor in a unipolar world.26 And until the Iraqi
state is reconstituted, there can be no stability, no democracy, no lasting end
to civil unrest, and no regional peace.27
Admittedly, Iraqi state failure is less evident today than it was five years
ago. Iraq has remained one country, despite an extraordinary invasion by
the worlds only superpower, followed by several years of destructive
upheaval. It has all the trappings of juridical statehood, even if the empirical
reality is less evident. It has an increasingly assertive and confident
government, a weak but growing military and police force, a carefully
written constitution, a national anthem, and a flag. It has held more than
one round of reasonably democratic elections. It has nearuniversal
international recognition, with diplomats in dozens of countries and a seat
at the United Nations. And it has a population of over thirty million people,
On unipolarity and its consequences, see Robert Jervis, Unipolarity: A Structural Perspective, World
Politics 61 (January 2009): 188213, and related articles in this issue.
27
Invoking sovereignty normssaying Iraq must solve its own problemsis most disingenuous when a
violation of sovereignty led to state failure. For an early discussion of American moral obligations in Iraq, see
Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
26
most of whom retain a sense of shared identity, or at least a shared history

that leads them to continue to identify themselves as Iraqis. Even its long
suffering Kurdish population has not made a serious recent bid for
independence; the most frequent and recurring calls for partitioning Iraq
have come from outside the country.28
These important markers of a common political space and nascent
institutions notwithstanding, no remotely wellfunctioning state exists in
Iraq today, much less a consolidated democratic regime with institutionalized mechanisms to govern responsively and accountably. This is the
central political challenge facing the Baghdad government, and it is likely
to remain so for some time. Both external intervention and internal
conflict have led to the deterioration of everything from the countrys
formal institutions of law, coercion, and administration to any lasting
sense of security and national unity. Iraq remains gripped by a
simmering, sometimes latent civil conflict, verging at times on civil
warby definition, a struggle over who will be at the helm of the political
organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the
territory. Iraqs current conflict is not like the American Civil War, which
evokes images of the Blue and the Gray fighting formal, setpiece battles.
Its upheaval is a twentyfirstcentury affair, with more than two sides,
substantial international involvement, extended duration, and civilians
suffering most of the casualties.29
Historical Context
Decisive international involvement has marked every phase of the creation,
rise, fall, and ongoing reconstitution of the Iraqi state. Iraqs early, modestly
developed state bureaucracy was created in the 1920s by British colonial
powers, who enlisted Sunni Arab officials from the former Ottoman
imperial provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.30 The early state was led
by an artificial monarchy established and imposed by Britain. Iraq had no
prior monarchy or nationalscale political organization, even if the Land
between the Two Rivers was one of the oldest settled communities in the
28
Kurdistan does have a flag, a national anthem, and longstanding aspirations for independence as the
largest ethnonational group in the Middle East without its own state. Some of the literature on partition and
ethnic conflict is noted in Alexander B. Downes, More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to
Ethnic Civil Wars, SAIS Review 26 (WinterSpring 2006): 4961.
29
On the early insurgency, see Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and CounterInsurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2006), 1124. On Iraqi state failure, see Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, Iraq in
Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Toby Dodge,
War and Resistance in Iraq: From Regime Change to Collapsed State in Rick Fawn and Raymond
Hinnebusch, eds., The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 211224.
30
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45.
world.31 A small nationalist faction of military officers ended the monarchy

in a bloody coup in 1958, ushering in a decade of political instability until
the Baathists took decisive control in 1968.32 The Baathists in subsequent
years had access to dramatically rising external oil rents, especially after
1973, and built a modernizing state apparatus. The regime did not
transform the social landscape entirely, choosing instead to maintain, co
opt, and even promote traditional social structures like clans, tribes, and
tribal confederations, while tapping into Iraqs ancient Mesopotamian
history to cultivate a unique national identity.33 It did use the state,
however, to create an exceptionally oppressive Republic of Fear.34
Under Saddams direct rule beginning in 1979, state institutional
development began to peak, though the Iraqi leader took actions that
precipitated an international response that led eventually to state failure.
Most significantly, Saddam launched invasions of neighboring Iran in 1980
and Kuwait in 1990. While profoundly costly in many ways, both wars
created opportunities for the consolidation of state power, the growth of the
security apparatus, and the elimination of domestic adversaries.35 From
1991 to 2003, in turn, the Iraqi state was subject to severe UNauthorized
sanctions and international isolation. These circumstances provided a
mechanism and rationale for further consolidation of state power and the
weakening of social forces in opposition to Saddams rule. In this sense,
throughout Saddams twentyfouryear rule, Iraq experienced an internationally driven double movement: the growth of state security institutions
via war and perceived or invoked foreign threats, and the paring down of
Lisa Anderson, Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East, Political Science
Quarterly 106 (Spring 1991): 115.
32
Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd alNasir and His Rivals, 19581970, 3d ed. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1971); Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007); Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004); and Adeed
Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
33
Amatzia Baram, NeoTribalism in Iraq: Saddam Husseins Tribal Policies, 199196, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (February 1997): 131; and Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and
Ideology in the Formation of Baathist Iraq, 19681989 (New York: St. Martins, 1991). On the old social
order, see Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraqs
Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baathists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989).
34
Kanan Makiya aka Samir alKhalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989).
35
See F. Gregory Gause, III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 45120; Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 19901991:
Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). The
interaction of war and statebuilding is familiar to students of European politics. See Charles Tilly, War
Making and State Making as Organized Crime in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda
Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169191.
31
most other state and societal institutions by the intense international

pressures of war and economic isolation. This double movement distorted
the shape of the Iraqi state and led to a downward spiral of sanctions,
seclusion, and institutional weakness.36 It also gave Saddam an incentive to
create some ambiguity regarding his regimes possession of weapons of
mass destruction. This ambiguity facilitated and even helped to inspire the
Bush administrations drive to war in Iraq by March 2003.37
War and State Destruction
The Iraq war itself was launched in 2003 because key officials in the Bush
administration saw it as a necessary and appropriate response to the threats
and opportunities facing the United States after September 11.38 The war
and subsequent occupation damaged the Iraqi state in three ways. First, it
nearly destroyed the administrative capacity of the state, requiring the
occupation authorities to rebuild in this area while contending with the
other major consequences of the war. Second, the wartime and postwar
As Toby Dodge writes, the story of Iraq from 1991 to 2003 is of a country suffering a profound
macroeconomic shock. As sanctions began to take effect after 1991, there was a rapid decline in the official
and visible institutions of the state. Toby Dodge, War and Resistance in Iraq in Fawn and Hinnebusch,
eds., The Iraq War, 212; and Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History
Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
37
See the work based on captured Iraqi documents, including Kevin M. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives
Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddams Senior Leadership, Joint Center for Operational
Analysis, United States Joint Forces Command/Institute for Defense Analyses, 2006; and Kevin M. Woods
and Mark E. Stout, Saddams Perceptions and Misperceptions: The Case of Desert Storm, The Journal of
Strategic Studies 33 (February 2010): 541. See also the declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation
interviews with Saddam, Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI: Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations with
High Value Detainee #1 in 2004, accessed at http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/
index.htm, 15 February 2013. On how and why the U.S. intelligence community missed all this, see Robert
Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 123157; as Jervis contends, the belief that Iraq had WMD programs was not deeply
unreasonable, given the information available to American analysts.
38
For a debate on the causes of the Iraq war, see Jane K. Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall, eds., Why Did the
United States Invade Iraq (New York: Routledge, 2011). See also Frank P. Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War:
Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Russell A.
Burgos, Origins of Regime Change: Ideapolitik on the Long Road to Baghdad, 19932000, Security
Studies 17 (AprilJune 2008): 221256; Brian C. Schmidt and Michael C. Williams, The Bush Doctrine and
the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists, Security Studies 17 (AprilJune 2008): 191220; and
Andrew Flibbert, The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War, Security
Studies 15 (AprilJune 2006): 310352. Other accounts of the wars origins include George Packer, The
Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Bob Woodward, Plan of
Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); James DeFronzo, The Iraq War: Origins and Consequences
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010); Jan Hallenberg and Hkan Karlsson, The Iraq War: European Perspectives
on Politics, Strategy and Operations (New York: Routledge, 2005), and Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil:
Washingtons Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York: Routledge,
2007). On the problems with Iraqrelated intelligence, see Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, 123155; and
James P. Pfiffner and Mark Phythian, eds., Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British
and American Perspectives (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008).
36
dismantling of the Iraqi military and security services crippled the states
capacity to control violence and maintain order, creating an absolute
dependence on foreign military power. Finally, the war undermined state
legitimacy, producing a high level of political uncertainty and insecurity,
which led to ethnic and sectarian mobilization and conflict.
Administrative incapacity. American military forces began Operation
Iraqi Freedom with a vaunted shock and awe campaign designed to
decapitate the regime while striking a crippling blow at the state itself.39
Aside from efforts to kill the Iraqi president and smash the regime and its
military power, American forces attacked a wide range of public facilities
and infrastructure, including roads, bridges, electrical transformers, and
communications. By its conclusion, the campaign had targeted most
government ministries and devastated the institutional apparatus of state
decision making.40 While the Ministry of Oil complex in northeast
Baghdads Mustansiriya neighborhood was spared, few other physical or
bureaucratic manifestations of the Iraqi state escaped the opening phases of
the war.41 A further blow to the administrative infrastructure was struck by
Iraqis themselves, who ransacked and looted almost all the remaining
ministries after the regimes collapse in April 2003.42 Reflecting the
ideological predisposition of the wars planners, U.S. forces reportedly had
no clear instructions from Central Command, the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, or the White House to contend with such an eventuality, and the
Pentagons newly established Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance proved unable to manage stabilizing efforts.43 In a few short
months, the administrative capacity of the Iraqi state was in ruins, disabling
On decapitation of government and other preliminary plans, see Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds
declassified talking points for a meeting with CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks on 27
November 2001, accessed at The National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB326/doc08.pdf, 15 February 2013.
40
Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2003); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); and Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War:
Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies,
2003).
41
Oil Ministry an Untouched Building in Ravaged Baghdad, Associated Press, 16 April 2003.
42
This included key cultural sites. Peter G. Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, The Destruction of Cultural
Heritage in Iraq (UK: The Boydell Press, 2008).
43
Details of prewar planning are in Nora Bensahel, Olga Oliker, Keith Crane, Richard R. Brennan, Jr.,
Heather S. Gregg, Thomas Sullivan, and Andrew Rathmell, After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the
Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008); Nora Bensahel, Mission Not Accomplished: What
Went Wrong with Iraqi Reconstruction, Journal of Strategic Studies 29 (June 2006): 453473. On ORHA,
see Gordon W. Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq: Regime Change, Jay Garner, and the ORHA Story (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2011).
39
subsequent efforts to devise and implement new policies and return power
to Iraqi nationals.44
If the war itself damaged the Iraqi state, the postwar American occupation
authorities were even more systematic in ridding Iraq of state administrative
authority and transforming its institutional landscape. Most famously, L.
Paul Bremers Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) eliminated or
acquiesced to the removal of the upper tier of the bureaucracy that Saddam
and the Baathists had built.45 With Order No. 1 of 16 May 2003, the CPA
expelled tens of thousands of Baath Party members from government service,
even if it left in place various midrange functionaries and streetlevel
bureaucrats.46 In the months that followed, the CPA overturned the states
lawmaking apparatus, substituting over 100 administrative decrees and
creating eventually a transitional administrative law, which was replaced by a
new constitution in 2005.47 Not confining itself to the political domain, the
CPA made plans to liberalize the economy by slashing subsidies on food and
energy, promoting foreign direct investment, and introducing international
banking.48 Its Office of Private Sector Development prepared to privatize or
close most of the countrys 189 stateowned enterprises, targeting over
100,000 Iraqi employees for firing or forced retirement.49 Given the larger
context of the invasion and the unraveling of organized authority, these
measures opened to contestation the most basic questions of political life, all
but collapsing the Iraqi state as an organization and undermining the Iraqi
nation as a community.
No available evidence suggests that the Bush administration anticipated
or desired the turmoil and destruction that its actions brought to Iraq. The
44
Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007), 96162; and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York:
Penguin Press, 2006).
45
A defensive but focused account is James Dobbins, Seth G. Jones, Benjamin Runkle, and Siddharth
Mohandas, Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
2009); see also L. Paul Bremer, III, with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a
Future of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
46
Estimates of the number of fired Baathists range from 20,000 to 140,000 in the top four to six ranks of the
party; some teachers, among others, came to be reinstated. Amit R. Paley and Joshua Partlow, Iraqs New
Law on ExBaathists Could Bring Another Purge, Washington Post, 23 January 2008.
47
CPA Regulations, Orders, Memoranda, and Public Notices issued between May 2003 and June 2004,
accessed at http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/, 15 February 2013. The American embassy in this
period became the largest in the world, with a reported 3,000 employees. Robert Fisk, The Pitiful
Restoration of Sovereignty, The Independent, 29 June 2004.
48
Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 205227, citing a variety of CPA memos, along with a ninepage CPA
Strategic Plan, Achieving the Vision to Restore Full Sovereignty to the Iraqi People, (1 October 2003). The
CPA document echoes verbatim some of President Bushs February 2003 American Enterprise Institute
speech, including the claim that we will stay [in Iraq] as long as necessary, and not a day longer (p. 4).
49
Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 223227, citing a Privatization Memo (4 October 2003) and a memo on
SOE Transition Plan Costs (17 December 2003), both from OPSD Director Tom Foley to Paul Bremer.
administration leaned hard on the regime and brought down the state in
the process, not as a core political objective so much as a byproduct of the
strategy informing its entire approach to the matter. Because Saddams
regime was wholly and irredeemably authoritarian, the White House
considered a change in personnel at the very top insufficiently transformative. The Baathists had to be displaced, even at the risk of what was
expected to be minor, temporary instability. This was an easy argument to
makeno one could defend the regimebut it created an immediate,
practical dilemma, the resolution of which rested on a more distant,
unstated assumption. The dilemma was evident in deciding where to draw
the line in winnowing out former regime members and political cadres who
also had bureaucratic, technical, or military experience needed in a post
Saddam Iraq. The unstated assumption, shared by the wars authors, was a
deeply Manichean sense of political life: a clearly demarcated world of good
and evil. This animating idea, which was at the heart of the drive to invade
Iraq in the first place, made it seem appropriate to take an aggressive
approach to purging former regime members. Just as ideational and
ideological considerations were paramount in the runup to the war, they
also shaped choices in its aftermath.50
In this fundamental sense, state failure in Iraq was a logical culmination
of the Bush administrations ideologically minimalist vision of the role and
necessity of the state in political life. It was not a simple error or oversight, so
much as a natural implication of the administrations presumptive
commitment to first principles devaluing the state.51 This vision started
from the premise that transforming Iraqi politics required disassembling
many of its major political institutions, or at least not making their
reconstitution a priority, as evidenced by the CPAs acute staffing shortage
and inexperienced personnel.52 The guiding assumption was that
This logic of appropriateness echoes, among others, James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, The
Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders in Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane, and
Stephen D. Krasner, eds., Exploration and Contestation in World Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999), 303329; Flibbert, The Road to Baghdad.
51
On this understanding of ideology, see Peter D. Feaver, Do Political Views Shape Security Studies? An
Underground Interview, HDiplo/ISSF, 4 June 2010, accessed at <http://www.hnet.org/diplo/ISSF/
PDF/ISSFRoundtable12.pdf, 2428>. An approving historical look at American antistatism is Aaron L.
Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas AntiStatism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). A varied collection of conservative perspectives is Gary
Rosen, ed., The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
52
Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 244252; and the ORHA draft document, A Unified Mission Plan for Post
Hostilities Iraq, 3 April 2003. Some of this can be traced to the American way of war, which focuses on
military operations rather than political outcomes; as Gideon Rose writes, The notion of warascombat is
deeply ingrained in the thinking of the American military and the country at large. Gideon Rose, How Wars
End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 2.
50
eliminating the specific institutional mechanisms of authoritarian rule

everything from courts and jails to the Baath Party, security services, and
officer corpswould suffice to ensure freedom and democratic development. Iraqis themselves, from this point of view, were expected to
reconfigure political authority in congenial, democratic forms, aided at
most by modest and neutral technical expertise from temporary
occupiers.53 Building new state structures like an array of public
institutions to channel political activism and influence behavior figured
little in such a plan because the administration, with its smallstate, private
sector orientation, tended to view government activity as problem, more
than solution.54
State insecurity. The most obvious security effect of the invasion was the
persistence and subsequent growth of domestic political violence in its
chaotic aftermath. This can be traced partly to the CPAs dissolution of the
military and security forces under Order No. 2 of 23 May 2003, which sent
home hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers and officers.55 Elements of
the state apparatus eliminated by this order included the Ministry of
Defense, the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of State for Military
Affairs, the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and all subsidiary military,
paramilitary, and intelligence organizations. The order also included the
Revolutionary Command Council, the National Assembly, and the
Revolutionary, Special and National Security Courts. Accordingly, this
eliminated Iraqs state coercive apparatus without replacing it fully and
immediately with either U.S. occupation forces, a comparable international
contingent, or revamped and repurposed Iraqi forces. Without a capable
mechanism to provide security, rein in the most implacable militants, oust
foreign agitators, and assure the rule of law, little could be done to prevent
an almost immediate deterioration after the regimes collapse in late
April 2003. Untold numbers of individuals from the various state
institutions shifted from potential supporters to determined opponents
of a postSaddam Iraq, forming the heart of the insurgency and launching
As President Bush noted in a major prewar speech at the American Enterprise Institute, The United States
has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraqs new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi
people. George W. Bush, President Discusses the Future of Iraq, 26 February 2003.
54
President Bush emphasized the power of freedom and an expected postwar American role in providing
food, medicine, and immediate security to Iraq, but only staying in the country as long as necessary, and not
a day more. He claimed that the United States had lived up to a similar commitment after World War II,
merely creating an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reformminded local leaders could build
lasting institutions of freedom. Bush, President Discusses the Future of Iraq, 26 February 2003.
55
The Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA Official Documents, Order 2, Dissolution of Entities with Annex
A, accessed at http://www.iraqcoaliton.org/regulations, 2 May 2012.
53

TABLE 2
War and the Dismantling of the Iraqi State
Administration
Damage to the public
infrastructure
Expulsion of Baath Party
government employees
Substitution of administrative
decrees and laws
Security
Dissolution and dispersal of
military and security forces
Inadequate reconstitution and
training of new forces
Legitimacy
Removal of regime leadership
Creation of political uncertainty and
an ethnic security dilemma
Failure to deliver basic goods
and services
the civil war that developed in subsequent months. American forces proved
unable to stem the violence (Table 2).56
Eventually, three changes in American strategy, each with significant
ideational origins and staterelated implications, began to improve security
conditions in Iraq. First, building on the Anbar Awakening of tribal leaders
who had become disillusioned with the insurgency, the United States
started coopting tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmensome of them
former insurgentsincorporating them into a network of Iraqi security
volunteers in September 2006.57 With their hiring and training,
substantial military elements flipped from erstwhile American adversaries
to at least temporary allies, providing local security and keeping the peace.
Second, American counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine underwent a rapid
but extensive reexamination, shifting from an enemycentric to a
populationcentric doctrine.58 With this new approach, American
counterinsurgents sought, among other things, to strengthen Iraqi
government legitimacy by protecting average Iraqis while engaging in
56
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraqs Green Zone (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006).
57
Significant U.S. cooperation with Sunni tribal leaders began near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province,
orchestrated by a local U.S. commander, Col. Sean MacFarland. Maj. Niel Smith and Col. Sean MacFarland,
Anbar Awakens: The Tipping Point, Military Review (MarchApril 2008), accessed at http://usacac.army.
mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_2008CRII0831_art011.pdf,
15
February 2013; Interview with Colonel Sean MacFarland, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,
17 January 2008, accessed at http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid3738, 15
February 2013; http://www.army.mil/news/2008/03/12/7889iraqisecurityvolunteersreceivefirst
monthspay/, 15 February 2013; and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/world/middleeast/23awakening.html?_r1&pagewantedall, 15 February 2013. For detailed interviews with Iraqi and American
participants, see Col. Gary W. Montgomery and CWO4 Timothy S. McWilliams, eds., AlAnbar Awakening:
Volume II, Iraqi Perspectives (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2009); and CWO4 Timothy S.
McWilliams and Lt. Col. Kurtis P. Wheeler, eds., AlAnbar Awakening: Volume I, American Perspectives
(Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2009).
58
U.S. Army Field Manual 324, Counterinsurgency, December 2006, accessed at <http://armypubs.army.
mil/doctricne/DR_pubs/dr_a/pdf/fm3_24.pdf, 15 February 2013 and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
what amounted to statebuilding. Finally, a January 2007 U.S. initiative

referred to commonly as the surge led to the deployment of approximately
30,000 additional American troops to Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.59
Driven partly by domestic political pressure from the 2006 congressional
midterm elections and manifest failings in the American effort, the surge
was designed to bring greater stability to the country by reinforcing key sites
in and around the capital.
The combined results surprised many observers, with a dramatic
reduction in civilian and military casualties throughout Iraq by early 2008,
as U.S. troops augmented growing Iraqi security forces, cultivated the
support of newly recruited security volunteers, and sought to win the
hearts and minds of the Iraqi population through better COIN
techniques.60 Political violence also may have declined because U.S.
military power repressed insurgents, local and national Iraqi forces deterred
them, and ethnic and sectarian conflict already had separated populations
sufficiently.61 Regardless, domestic developments like the Anbar Awakening joined U.S. and Iraqi government efforts to reverse the momentum on
the ground. 2008 proved to be a watershed in the war, as the Iraqi army and
police made progress toward reasserting the states role in providing
security and stability, however tenuous and fragile.
Illegitimacy and violence. Finally, forced state failure in Iraq had
immediate consequences for domestic social relations, most notably in
the ethnic and sectarian tensions that emerged after the insurgency
developed in mid2003. Rising violence and unchecked lawlessness in the
wars immediate aftermath endangered average Iraqis, who could not turn
to state authorities or an international presence for protection. Many
responded by calling on extended families and social connections, especially
those with whom they shared ethnic or sectarian bonds. Following self
help strategies, they retreated into the ethnic and sectarian dimensions of
Presidents Address to the Nation, 10 January 2007, accessed at <http://georgewbushwhitehouse.
archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/200701103.html>; Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq,
accessed at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/200701103.html>; and the National
Security Council summary briefing slides from the Iraq Strategic Review, accessed at http://georgewbush
whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/iraq/2007/iraqstrategy011007.pdf, 2 May 2012.
60
Iraqi civilian deaths dropped from a daily average of 73 (2006) to 63 (2007), 24 (2008), 12.6 (2009), 11.2
(2010), and 11.2 (2011). Accessed at http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/, 15 February 2013. U.S.
military deaths dropped from a peak annual total of 904 (2007) to 314 (2008), 149 (2009), 60 (2010), and
54 (2011). Accessed at http://icasualties.org/, 15 February 2013.
61
Dissenting views of the surge include Juan Cole, Forget the SurgeViolence is Down in Iraq Because
Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective, 29 July 2008, accessed at <http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/
93081/>; Steve Simon, The Price of the Surge, Foreign Affairs (May/June 2008); and Bob Woodward, The
War Within: A Secret White House History, 20062008 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
59
their identities, because this was the most reliable and readily available
means of selfdefense.62 With a diminished local source of security and an
undersized international contingent, Iraqis mobilized in ways consistent
with a distorted and atrophied civil society that had experienced years of
state oppression and internationally mandated deprivation.
Ethnic and sectarian identities acquired heightened importance because
of the structurally induced political uncertainty created by state failure.
Mobilization along such lineseven for defensive purposesled to an
ethnic security dilemma also found in earlier cases of state failure, most
notably in the former Yugoslavia.63 As individuals and groups joined others
with whom they had social commonalities, they became more powerful and
potentially threatening to other groups, who responded accordingly. At
least some Iraqis joined militias out of fear, and when such fears and other
grievances led to countergrievances, political violence resulted. This
happened not because it was inherent in Iraqi ethnic or sectarian
differences, but because there was no larger organized authority or political
power to prevent minor conflicts from becoming major ones, to minimize
the settling of old scores, or to keep domestic and international
opportunists from raising the pressure to build their own support. In the
absence of capable, nationally organized political authority, people found
other sources of protection.64
Never politically monolithic, even under Baathist rule, Iraqi Shiite
mobilization and activism took various forms, with the population divided
among several political factions and associated militias. These groups were
organized by leaders with ties to the clerical establishment, exile groups,
political movements based in Iran, and the underground opposition. The
Sunnis, for their part, were most disadvantaged by Saddam Husseins
removal and contributed to a variety of insurgent groups. Having lost
control of the state, the Sunni minority sought to regain it while defending
itself from muchfeared retribution for decades of dominance in national
politics. The Kurds, finally, strengthened their existing political and
military organizations in the north under the longstanding factions led by
National Security Council, Iraq Strategic Review 2007, briefing slide (p. 7): In the absence of security,
communities are turning to selfhelp. Accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/iraq/2007/iraq
strategy011007.pdf, 2 May 2013.
63
Barry Posen, The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict, Survival 35 (Spring 1993): 2747; Chaim
Kaufman, Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars, International Security 20 (Spring
1996): 136175.
64
On sectarianisms political malleability, see Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of
Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 764; Ghassan Salam, ed., Democracy without
Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Taurus, 1994).
62
Jalal Talibani and Massoud Barzani. The Kurdish political position vis
vis the state was distinctive for many reasons, including the de facto
autonomy of the Kurdish north under the Kurdistan Regional Government
and an ethnonationalism that for years had put most Kurds at odds with
their Arab coreligionists of either sectarian identity.
While Iraqi forced state failure led to domestic upheaval, this was not an
inevitable result of the diversity of Iraqs political community. Many
countries, after all, are more diverse than Iraq in ethnic and racial terms,
more divided in popular political aspirations, more artificial in their
borders, more impoverished in human and natural resources, and more
heterogeneous in their sectarian divisions. Open and sustained political
violence is uncommon in most of these placesthe United States among
thembecause they have functioning state institutions and, in the best
cases, democratic regimes that enhance state legitimacy and channel social
grievances toward nonviolent resolution most of the time, however
imperfectly. To make a direct causal connection between Iraqi social
diversity and domestic political violence is to ignore the institutional and
international contexts that are at the heart of politics in Iraq and beyond.
With externally induced state failure leading to ethnic and sectarian
violence, moreover, political reconciliation was not a productive solution to
the problem. Calls for reconciliation revealed a false diagnosis of Iraqs key
difficulties, which were institutional as much as communal. After 2003, it
was not that Iraqis could never get along with each other; it was that they
could get not along without mechanisms to minimize fear and vulnerability
in a profoundly uncertain political environment. This was especially true
because postwar Iraq was primed for a disastrous outbreak of violence,
given the extent to which fear had pervaded Saddams Iraq after nearly two
decades of continuous war, sanctions, social deprivation, and political
oppression. Without Saddams regimeIraqs Leviathan in the worst sense
it should not have been surprising that the country flew apart in the wars
aftermath.
American actions in Iraq, like its larger approach to conflict resolution in
the Middle East, reflected the assumption that improved human relations
trust and reconciliation between contending social groupswere critical
sources of political stability and progress.65 Rarely mentioned by the
President and his advisers, the Iraqi state was expected to play a relatively
minor role, helping primarily to solve basic collective problems, facilitate
65
William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Peace Process Since 1967, 3d ed.,
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2006).
individual political and economic initiatives, and implement decisions

reached largely outside its confines.66 Treating politics like a garden to be
tended may work in the American context, but only because the United
States is sufficiently powerful to prevent international adversaries from
intervening directly in its national political life. American institutions have
not always been successful in mediating political troubles, most notably in
the American Civil War, the bloodiest episodeforeign or domestic
in U.S. history. When foreign threats have posed grave challenges to the
United States, whether during the Cold War or the war on terror, domestic
institutional change has been rapid, significant, and enduring. It defies all
reason to expect Iraqis to interact freely and peaceably in a weakly
institutionalized environment, with an open struggle for political primacy,
ethnic and sectarian mobilization, foreign interference and occupation, and
a postauthoritarian legacy of violence and mistrust.
CONCLUSION: BROKEN STATES AND ENDURING DILEMMAS
The conventional view of what went wrong in Iraq is simple and reasonable.
It holds that if the United States had only deployed more troops in 2003,
positioned them better, maintained border control, kept the Iraqi military
and Baathist bureaucrats engagedif it had invaded Iraq with enough
troops and a careful postwar plan that it implemented properlythe
insurgency and civil war could have been avoided. A host of government
officials, security experts, journalists, and military leaders have made this
claim, some even before the war was launched.67 It is hard to contest,
because it captures a critical aspect of the tragedy of the Iraq wara war of
choice but also a war of poor choices.
This view is shortsighted, however, because what went wrong in Iraq was
not simply poor planning and implementation, and to frame it as such is to
miss the point.68 In fact, the Bush administration was never likely to have
launched and conducted the war in ways conducive to a significantly better
66
Not surprisingly, no mention of the Iraqi state appears in either the Presidents February 2003 speech
anticipating the invasion or his eventual memoir. President Discusses the Future of Iraq, 26 February 2003;
and George W. Bush, Decision Point (New York: Crown, 2010).
67
Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki famously identified the problem in testimony to the Senate Armed
Services Committee in February 2003. Eric Schmitt, Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation
Forces Size, The New York Times, 28 February 2003.
68
See, for example, Daniel Byman, An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?
Security Studies 17 (October 2008): 599643; and Larry Diamond, Building Democracy After Conflict:
Lessons from Iraq, Journal of Democracy 16 (January 2005): 923. Defense official Douglas Feith
emphasizes leadership and implementation problems by CPA head Paul Bremer, among others. Douglas
Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York:
HarperCollins, 2008), 441449.
outcome. Most of the highranking officials in the administration were so

ideologically predisposed to ridding Iraq of state authoritynot just
Saddams noxious regimethat it is hard to imagine the war having achieved
any other result. Deploying half a million U.S. troops, keeping Baathists in
positions of authority, maintaining the Iraqi military, and forgoing
democratization would have contradicted the fundamental ideational
impetus to the war. Such actions also would have been politically difficult,
if not impossible. In this regard, the very decision to go to war with a purpose
and a plan that made sense to the administration contained the seeds of Iraqi
state failure, with all the attendant consequences. The same thinking that
caused the war also precluded a decent peace in the ensuing years.69
This is not to say that another administration, differently oriented, could
have invaded the country and deposed Saddam easily and without damage
to the Iraqi state. With the regime deeply implicated in state institutions on
all levels, more U.S. troops and sensible planning from the outset might
have reduced some of the spectacular violence and upheaval, but success
still would have required a wholesale restructuring of the Iraqi statea
deeply unpalatable project for any external actor under most circumstances.
Iraq is therefore a cautionary tale with wider implications, because even if
the Bush administration had not been predisposed to dismantling the Iraqi
state, it would have had a hard time achieving anything worth the cost. For
this reason, the war itself should not be viewed as badly conducted so much
as badly conceived. It was a fools errand from the start, not because Iraq
had no weapons of mass destructionanother conventional critiquebut
because military power is a blunt instrument in the pursuit of political
change.
Regardless of the inherent difficulties, the conventional view is also
deficient in that few analysts frame the Iraq war and its troubles explicitly in
terms of externally induced state failure, preferring simpler formulations
flawed planning and military deploymentsto account for the initial
failures and later successes of the American initiative. This approach tells
only the obvious part of the story, skipping the causally prior ideational
dimension that explains these errors. The ideas dominant in American
thinking about the war led observers to emphasize variables that were
69
While not offering an ideational explanation for the war, Robert Jervis makes a similar point about the
importance of beliefs about the wars wisdom in Robert Jervis, War, Intelligence, and Honesty: A Review
Essay, Political Science Quarterly 123 (Winter 200809): 645675. Likewise, Clausewitz, in describing war
as never something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy, writes that statesmen and
commanders must know the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to
turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993), 100.
significant but not always fundamental (ethnic and sectarian cleavage),

while nearly ignoring other variables that were paramount (state
institutions). The result was akin to a socially shared cognitive bias that
privileged one set of readymade, easily recognizable factors over all others.
It promoted a kind of seeing and not seeing, or political hallucination and
myopia.
Direct attention to state failure provides a superior analytical key,
because a broadgauged emphasis on the state is markedly better than a
narrow focus on troop numbers, the surge, or any other onedimensional
explanation for Iraqs myriad problems over the years. It captures the
multifaceted and complex nature of the challenge in a single, well
established concept. It speaks prescriptively to the ongoing importance of
rebuilding state institutions in the present and future. And it avoids the
conceptual and policy confusion that has accompanied references to
nation building, rather than to what really has been happening in the
reconfiguration of Iraqi political institutions. This might seem like a minor
semantic distinction, but the persistent misidentification of Iraqs troubles
as social and communal rather than political and institutional had major
and deadly consequences for the country and its occupiers.
Accordingly, a focus on forced state failure offers both general and Iraq
specific lessons for efforts to rebuild state institutions and authority. In
broadest terms, the analysis supports the claim that once a state is knocked
over, setting it right again is no small tasknot just a matter of holding
elections, establishing a government, making sound policy choices, or
having enough troops, either initially or eventually. Statebuilding typically
is a long historical process, best conducted by those with permanent stakes
on the ground. Successful state builders tend to have extended time
horizons, as well as the resources, commitments, insights, political support,
and status not available to outsiders. European state formation, after all,
occurred over centuries, just as the American experience was drawn out,
included a costly Civil War, and occurred under relatively benign
international conditions. State and nation building in postcolonial contexts
rarely goes smoothly in either its institutional or communal dimensions,
much less in responding to calls for democracy.70
Statebuilding after external intervention is especially difficult, because
even the most aggressively forced state failure does not mean the
70
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 9901992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). See also
Lisa Anderson, Antiquated Before They Can Ossify: States That Fail Before They Form, Journal of
International Affairs 58 (Fall 2004): 116; and Joel S. Migdal, State Building and the NonNationState,
Journal of International Affairs 58 (Fall 2004), 1746.
eliminationerased existenceof all institutional history. Earlier institutional choices and conditions can have an ongoing influence on later
events.71 Institutions live on in revamped organizations, collective and
individual memories, bureaucratic norms and work routines, and state
workers training and established procedures. Like a demolished house, the
building material is present, to be reassembled or swept away by future
builders, though never entirely. Institutional change, in this sense, does not
occur in a political vacuum. People fight about it. People are fighting not
just to win the political game; they are fighting over the very rules of the
game.72
Equally broadly, American involvement in Iraq suggests that international powers usually are too distant, in various ways, to correct all the many
domestic failures of state legitimacy, security, and administration induced
in the course of a major intervention. An external power might be able to
undermine state legitimacy, but it cannot restore it at will. The much
publicized restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004 ignored the reality
that sovereignty is as much about legitimate domestic authority as it is
about international recognition.73 An external power might also be able to
eliminate state military power and a domestic security apparatus, but doing
so opens up a Pandoras box of trouble and puts the external power in a poor
position to rebuild what it has destroyed or displaced. Likewise, an external
power might be able to remove the state administration, but this creates an
immediate need to take charge of administrative functions and serve as a
surrogate state until such capacity can be rebuilt. Restoring this capacity is
like repairing a sinking ship at sea, where everyone wants to be captain.
Explicit attention to the dilemmas created by forced state failure also can
illuminate Americanled international involvement elsewhere, including
Afghanistan. It tells us that if the prospects for success in Iraq are uncertain,
they are all but nonexistent in Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is not
actually a failed state, externally induced or otherwise, never having had a
fully articulated national state, much less experienced forced state failure.
For a complex array of historical reasons, its governance has remained
relatively localized and traditional, with no effective nationalscale political
party or organization extending throughout the land, and no successful
Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science in Ira
Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds., Political Science: State of the Discipline (New York: W.W. Norton,
2002), 693721.
72
For democracy as the devolution of power from a group of people to a set of rules, see Adam Przeworski,
Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1014.
73
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
71
effort to transform the social and political landscape by modern state

builders. As a result, the ongoing struggle between the U.S.led
International Security Assistance Force and a resurgent Taliban is unlikely
to end with a satisfactory outcome for the United States, which cannot
remain engaged for remotely as long as the statebuilding process requires.
An emphasis on the deep shortcomings of the Afghan state itselfnot only
its erratic leadership, corruption problems, or the countrys tribal social
structureswould illuminate the American dilemma in South Asia, as the
drumbeat of withdrawal from Afghanistan grows louder in anticipation of
an end to the ISAF mission in 2014.
Equally significant are the lessons of Iraqi state failure for political
transitions in the Middle East and North Africa, where attention to state
level pathologies and their international connections is essential. In the
upheaval of the Arab Spring, for example, events in Libya and Yemen
unfolded very differently from those in Egypt and Tunisia, not only because
Muammar elQaddafi differed from Hosni Mubarak but because Libyan
and Egyptian state institutions differed fundamentally. To the south,
Sudans division into two countries, ending an illconceived colonial
project, remains commonly mischaracterized as a product of ethnic and
sectarian tensions rather than state failure. Syria has been an object lesson
in what vicious and desperate state leaders still can do with the acquiescence
of powerful international actors and in full view of a divided international
community. In Lebanon, Hezbollah continues to operate as a rumpstate
within a virtual nonstate with limited prospects, given the extent of
international involvement. More broadly, statelevel deficiencies explain
why there still are pirates off the coast of Somalia, warlords in Afghanistan,
and persistently powerful tribes in Libya, Yemen, and beyond.74 To address
all these issues, American policymakers need to make clearer connections
between the international actions and conditions that promote state failure
and the resulting political blowback that often comes back to haunt the
world.
Having withdrawn from Iraq, the challenge for the United States today is
to remain sufficiently engaged to avoid a profoundly compromised outcome
that harms the interests of all concerned. A great deal is still uncertain, for it
remains to be seen whether Iraq will yield mixed success or will become a
sharper failure. While the administration of Barack Obama is not
responsible for the original invasion, it must be attentive to how the entire
74
For the long view, see Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830
1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
episode affects perceptions of American leadership, both globally and in the

Middle East. As it stands, the failure to negotiate a deal for U.S. troop
immunity in 2011 transformed the drawdown into a complete pullout,
further diminishing Americas capacity to support and stabilize an
independent Iraq. This problem is especially acute at a time when U.S.
leadership in the region is becoming increasingly irrelevant to everything
from the ArabIsraeli conflict to democratization initiatives.
Ultimately, the heart of the dilemma is that Iraq needs a triple transition
a rebuilt state, lasting movement toward democracy, and regional peace
but the prospects for each are slight, and all three are interconnected. A
reconstituted Iraqi state is under way, though it was not achieved before the
American departure. Iraqi democracy, for its part, is likely to remain
tenuous, not due to any cultural incompatibility with democratic
governance, but because democratic regimes presuppose coherent state
institutions, which are essential to the rule of law. Finally, the movement
toward regional peace is bleaker than it has been for two decades, with
renewed ArabIsraeli tension, a frozen PalestinianIsraeli peace process, a
gamechanging Iranian nuclear initiative, sinking TurkishIsraeli relations, and peripheral pressures from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen,
Lebanon, and Sudan. Locally driven democratic initiatives across the
region bode well for the future, but it is hard to imagine the toughest cases
Syria, Libya, Yemenachieving successful transitions without significant
further turmoil and loss of life.
This is the real dilemma created by forced state failure in Iraq. Not only
are state, regime, and regional transformations in all three areas unlikely,
but the dynamics of domestic and international change are potentially at
odds with each other. One cannot achieve Iraqi democracy without
rebuilding the Iraqi state, though external actors may overwhelm or distort
the internal necessities of state building. Regional peace would purchase
extraordinary goodwill on the Iraq front, but its absence makes an Iraqi
solution much more difficult by encouraging foreign powers to meddle in
Iraq. At a minimum, the Iraq experience has made it clearer than ever that
domestic political change is not easily accomplished through international
military intervention. The hubris of great powers seeking to remake the
world is almost as old as Iraq itself; the consequences will endure.
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The Consequences of Forced State

ANDREW FLIBBERT is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and is

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coercive, administrative, legal, and extractive institutions. Without

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a brief discussion of policy implications for the United States, including

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contributions to achieving socially desirable objectives.5 Accompanying the

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neglect after the Soviet withdrawal, rather than deeper, historically

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domestic conflict. Echoing the terms economic origins, some of these

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Provision of collective goods or basic needs

Control over means of violence

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trigger or a secondary influence on domestic actors.24 In a globalizing

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IRAQ AND THE HUMPTY-DUMPTY STATE

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most of whom retain a sense of shared identity, or at least a shared history

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world.31 A small nationalist faction of military officers ended the monarchy

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most other state and societal institutions by the intense international

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eliminating the specific institutional mechanisms of authoritarian rule

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what amounted to statebuilding. Finally, a January 2007 U.S. initiative

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individual political and economic initiatives, and implement decisions

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outcome. Most of the highranking officials in the administration were so

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significant but not always fundamental (ethnic and sectarian cleavage),

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effort to transform the social and political landscape by modern state

STATE FAILURE AND IRAQ | 95

episode affects perceptions of American leadership, both globally and in the

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