Review Essay: How Iraq Was lost

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Raad Alkadiri and Tim Lynch for their comments on earlier drafts. The opinions expressed in the texts are mine alone. Notes 1 See, for example, Richard Pearle's testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington DC, 20 April 2004. 2 See Toby Dodge, Iraq's Future: the Aftermath of Regime Change, Adelphi Paper 372 (Abingdon: Routledge for The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005), pp. 10–11. 3 Quoted in Michael Gordon, ‘“Catastrophic Success”: The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War’, New York Times, 19 October 2004. 4 See Toby Dodge, ‘US Intervention and Possible Iraqi Futures’, Survival, vol. 45, no. 3, Autumn 2003, p. 114. 5 See, for example, Oxford Research International, National Survey of Iraq, February 2004. 6 See Toby Dodge, ‘A Grim Wake-up Call for US in the Fight to Build Democracy’, Guardian, 29 October 2003. 7 William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, ‘Democracy Will Have to Wait, US Tells Iraq’, Washington Post, 30 June 2003; Phillps, p. 170; and Dodge, ‘US Intervention’, p. 109. 8 See Reidar Visser's excellent ‘Sistani, the United States and Politics in Iraq: From Quietism to Machiavellianism?’, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Paper No. 700, 2006. 9 See for example Dan Senor and Walter Slocombe, ‘Too Few Good Men’, New York Times, 17 November 2005. 10 Interview with Walter Slocombe, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/interviews/slocombe.html. 11 Phillips estimates it made 120,000 unemployed out of a total party membership of 2 m. Bremer cites intelligence estimates that it effected 1% of the party membership, or 20,000 people. Packer estimates ‘at least thirty-five thousand’. The large variation in estimates indicated the paucity of reliable intelligence on the ramifications of such an important policy decision. See Phillips, pp. 145–6; Bremer, p. 40; Packer, p. 191. 12 L. Paul Bremer III, ‘Iraq's Path to Sovereignty’, Washington Post, 8 September 2003. 13 For greater detail on this see Toby Dodge, ‘State Collapse and the Rise of Identity Politics’, in Markus Bouillon, David Malone and Ben Rowsell (eds), Preventing Another Generation of Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, in press). 14 See Toby Dodge, ‘Iraq: the Contradictions of Exogenous State Building in Historical Perspective’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, 2006, pp. 187–200. 15 See Frank Rich, ‘A Shadow Government Rife with Corruption’, International Herald Tribune, 26 June 2006. 16 See Diamond, p. 30; Packer, p. 127; Gordon, ‘“Catastrophic Success”’. Additional informationNotes on contributorsToby DodgeToby Dodge is Senior Consulting Fellow for the Middle East at The International Institute for Strategic Studies and a Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London.