[Prefatory Note: In the face of the failure of the US Government to use its diplomatic
leverage to end the war in Ukraine, and renounce the project to score a geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of the people of Ukraine (and Russia) and persisting with its active complicity with Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people residing in Gaza, and so far to a lesser extent to those residing in the West Bank, this book could not be timelier. It is a grim reminder of the Iraq War precedent in which the United States openly embraced a criminal path in both its attack and long occupation of Iraq beginning with “shock and awe’ unprovoked aggression and culminating in a state-building venture that brought the Islamic State to the region. Memories of geopolitical failures of the magnitude of what took place over the course of more than a decade of occupation and supposed state-building is brilliantly depicted in this authoritative book dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Ismael, the long devoted partner of Tareq Ismael. It was my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword to this fine book, just published, which I strongly recommend both to remind us of the Iraq War and its dismal aftermath, and to cast light on the present negation of the most minimal standards of decency in the course of human interaction. I find myself haunted by a simple epistemological question: WHY DO WE AS A NATION, PEOPLE, AND SPECIES REFUSE TO LEARN FROM PAST TRAGIC FAILURES?]
Intrioducing Pax Americana: Ae
Foreword to Pax Americana: America’s Unending War on Iraq by
Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, & Leslie T. MacDonald
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Narrating the Logic of Pax Americana
Recent references to the Iraq War of 2003 in the West tend mostly to
come from the political or anti-war left sources seemingly intent on issuing
stern reminders that Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was foreshadowed in
its most objectionable features by the US/UK attack followed by a long
controversial occupation of Iraq, while the mainstream tries to erase
America’s experience from collective memory.
Those invoking Iraq as a precedent relevant to Ukraine offer a justifi-
able critique of the imperial aspects of American foreign policy that make
a mockery of self-righteous appeals to international law and the UN
Charter to mobilize international opposition to Russia while building
global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and huge donations of eco-
nomic assistance. Adopting such an ahistorical, abstract, and Eurocentric
optic, however useful, comes at a price. Iraq loses its core reality as a coun-
try inhabited by people who have endured the trials and tribulations of
tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The US
refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South,
especially in the countries of the Middle East, vividly confirmed by its
complicity in Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon Gaza, remains a significant
precedent in relation to the policy debate about Ukraine, but it is far from
telling the whole story of the Iraqi ordeal of the past 80 years.
This remarkable book is written by Jacqueline and Tareq Ismael, both
highly respected Iraqi specialists who are longtime scholarly commenta-
tors on the sorrowful recent history of the country. They present us with
Forewordviii FOREWORD
a devastating critique of the American role in Iraq during the 20 years
since the ill-conceived aggression of 2003, but they do much more. Above
all, they convincingly explicate the comprehensive anatomy of victimiza-
tion that became the fatal destiny of Iraq and its people, climaxing with
the aggressive regime-changing war of 2003. The historical contextualiza-
tion of the war and the refusal to erase from political consciousness its
terrible impact on the Iraqi civilian population is what makes this book
such a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understand-
ing imparted by their analysis goes far deeper than typically superficial
assessments based on a simple model of ‘attack and occupation.’
Jacqueline Ismael, who sadly died earlier this year, and Tareq, her Iraqi-born
writing partner and husband, have long devoted their scholarly lives
to narrating the American desecration of Iraq. Additionally, they have
together built an ambitious academic infrastructure that has made major
contributions to Iraqi studies. These have included the founding of a jour-
nal, organizing international conferences, and publishing books. And per-
haps most of all, by developing an international community of scholars
committed to probing various less-known, yet integral, aspects of the
complex Iraqi experience of the last century. This high-quality scholarship
should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Beltway think
tanks that offer the US government menus of policy options that are gen-
erally pleasing to the Pentagon and mainstream foreign policy venues. In
contrast, the Ismael orientation is objective, exhibiting and encouraging
others to undertake interdisciplinary styles of inquiry and assessment. This
work also valuably merges standard political and economic concerns with
serious attention to the social, ethical, religious, and even artistic and phil-
osophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural heritage. It is this
heritage that has been shattered by Iraq’s encounters with America in the
course of fragmenting the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.
In this necessarily last collaborative book, the Ismaels draw on their
superb qualifications to share with us their cumulative knowledge and wis-
dom about Iraq. This short but profound book manages to consider both
the disasters that have befallen Iraq but also the confused and sinister
behavior embedded in this pattern of dysfunctional US deployments of
hard and soft power over a period of six decades. What results is a highly
instructive book that contextualizes US geopolitical tactics and strategies
in a manner that sheds light on a host of other contemporary concerning
issues around the world. In essence, the Ismaels have managed to interpret
the interplay of America’s global and regional hegemonic ambitions inix FOREWORD
ways that yield a deeply informed narrative of the tragic events that have
ravaged Iraq and spilled over its borders to cause comparable forms of
distress elsewhere in the region. The book brilliantly depicts the intercon-
nections between the fate of Iraq and that of the Middle East as a whole,
presenting an illuminating account of why the impacts of the American
imperial agenda should not be conceptualized as mere aggression followed
by an occupation devoted to benign ‘state-building’ undertakings suppos-
edly aimed at constitutional governance and developmental dynamism.
With electrifying clarity, the Ismaels show that contemporary tragedy of
Iraq should not begin, as in most assessments with a focus on the two wars
in 1991 and 2003, their interim of harsh sanctions, and their chaotic after-
maths, but look at the downward spiral of events starting in 1963. The
book’s illuminating, mostly ignored or suppressed starting point is the
1963 CIA-facilitated coup that replaced the nationalist Qasim govern-
ment with the dictatorial repressive Ba’athist Party leadership, eventually
headed by Saddam Hussein. Tareq Ismael’s personal history of living in
exile ever since this coup and forever scarred by these events of 60 years
that culminated in the roundup and massacre of at least 5000 Iraqi intel-
lectuals and progressive. political activists, lends an aura of authenticity
and significance to these barely recollected events.
In a manner the 1963 coup in Iraq recalls the 1953 coup in Iran that
overthrew the Mossadegh government with the covert help and encour-
agement of the CIA, anticipating in several of its particulars the Iraqi
undertaking ten years later. In Iran, the Shah was restored to the Peacock
Throne, and more importantly, foreign ownership of the Iranian oil indus-
try was restored, with leading American energy corporations the greatly
enriched beneficiaries.
The true character of these events in both major oil producing coun-
tries was thinly disguised by then fashionable Cold War rationalizations of
saving these countries from a Communist takeover by marginalizing and
discrediting Soviet/Marxist/socialist influences that purportedly under-
mined Western strategic interests in the Middle East, as well as threatening
these countries with Stalinist futures. Such state propaganda, spread by an
ideologically subservient Western media, downplayed the true strategic
motivation for these disruptive political events, which was to keep the
energy reserves of the region under secure Western control while entrust-
ing their custodianship to the American oil industry. In this process, the
disregard for the sovereign self-determination rights of the state and suf-
fering of the peoples that followed was ignored as were the allegations thatx FOREWORD
the outcomes reflected the maneuvers of the CIA rather than the revolt of
nationalist forces. Only years later was the instrumental role of the CIA
widely confirmed. The original public rationale portrayed the events as
internally driven anti-Communist rejections of hysterical or tyrannical
leaders.
The book draws appropriate attention to the critical differences between
regime-changing interventions in the period between 1950 and 1990, and
those taking place after the Soviet implosion in 1991. Earlier efforts to
disrupt the politics of self-determination were hidden and covertly carried
out, and hence entrusted to the CIA and collaborating national elites in
countries targeted for regime change. The only overt exceptions of any
consequence during the Cold War occurred in the two wars taking place
in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam where international fault
lines were breached by the revisionist behavior of rival nationalist forces
seeking restored unification of the states as single nations. Elsewhere, the
United States tried to disrupt what it opposed by acting off-stage and rely-
ing on compliant national elements to construct the successor states.
After the Cold War the dynamic of intervention in the Middle East
became overtly militarist, tied to arms sales and predatory globalization.
The US sought to legitimize these overt interventions at the UN by claim-
ing humanitarian and international law justification or counterinsurgency
imperatives in the face of alleged terrorist threats. Among the rationaliza-
tions put forward in 2003 for violating Iraq’s state boundaries were its
possession of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret pro-
gram to develop nuclear weapons; Afghanistan after 9/11 as safe haven for
international terrorism; humanitarian urgency in Libya concerning the
beleaguered population of Benghazi. If UN legitimation was not granted,
as was the case with Iraq (and earlier Kosovo, 1999), then the US together
with allies proceeded to intervene openly, feeling no need for the secrecy
it relied upon during the Cold War. When the UN Security Council
refused the American request for authorization to use force in Iraq, George
W. Bush angrily suggesting that if the UN decided to withhold approval
of US war plans, it would find itself irrelevant. And regrettably, Bush was
to some extent right.
This overtness, also enabled prolonged foreign occupations, and in Iraq
was an alleged necessity to complete the challenge of liberating the coun-
try from its dictatorial past, which required ensuring that the successor
state was a stable and secure exemplar of constitutional democracy. The
only thing hidden from view in carrying out such state-building plans arexi FOREWORD
the various aspects of economic exploitation, including a forced entry into
neoliberal world economy.
This form of state-building by an occupying foreign power is half of the
abusive story exposed by this book. The other half has not been previously
explicated. What the Ismaels have managed to demonstrate through their
focus on the specifics of the American occupation is a set of policies that
had the intended effects of doing the opposite of what was claimed for
state-building. In actuality, the American occupation destroyed prospects
of a stable, competent, and prosperous Iraq, let alone a state protective of
human security and public order. The policies and practices systematically
pursued destroyed sturdy pillars of governmental stability that existed in
Iraq prior to 2003. The occupation purged the armed forces and bureau-
cracy of its Sunni highly professional staffing during the Ba’athist period,
turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and archeological artifacts
undermining cultural identity and national consciousness. Such an
approach gave ample political space to the assertion of a variety of sub-national
grievances and embittered rivalries among religious factions and
ethnic minorities. As the Ismaels explain state-building turned out in Iraq
to be state-ending, such a dismal assessment of the occupation manifested
itself through greatly increased ethnic strife, radical micro-politics, rising
criminality, gross corruption, persisting chaos, and increasing poverty.
It is for these reasons that ‘state-building,’ as argued by the authors, is
better conceptualized as a process of ‘state-ending’ or ‘state deconstruc-
tion.’ This is a radical claim that goes far beyond critiques of the conven-
tional understanding state-building as benevolence gone wrong with
Afghanistan and Iraq especially in mind. The shocking argument that the
Ismaels advance for our consideration is that this outcome was not a fail-
ure of occupation policy but a deliberately orchestrated success. The goal
of such an approach may seem perverse, but reflects American deep state
thinking on the Middle East, as strongly paralleled by Israeli beliefs and
practice, that the cornerstone of regional security is not so much a matter
of weaponry as it is in the existence of weak, internally divided and preoc-
cupied states.
In an informative chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority
further concreteness is added to the exposition of how occupation mis-
shaped Iraq by showing that the US and Israel both promoted Kurdish
aspirations in ways that weakened Iraqi sense of national identity, so vital
for successful state formation projects.xii FOREWORD
The geopolitical hypocrisy of the American role in Iraq is given a bipar-
tisan slant that goes back to the Kennedy role in promoting the 1963 coup
against Qasim and forward to the efforts of both Bush’s to wage war
against their former client state, Iraq. We need to remember that in 1980
Saddam’s Iraq had been persuaded to attack Iran in what turned out to be
a grueling eight-year war, partly extended by US arms sales to both sides.
In addition, Saddam was given ambiguous signals a decade later by the US
ambassador in Baghdad about launching an attack on subsequent annexa-
tion of Kuwait, only to find Iraq subject to international denunciations by
the US President, Arab neighbors, and the UN as a legitimizing prelude
to a ‘shock and awe’ attack, and after another twelve years of punitive
sanctions that ravaged the civilian population of Iraq, yet another American
aggression launched against its former notorious ally who ended up pay-
ing with his life.
This mastery of the Iraq narrative by the Ismaels does what most Iraqi
commentators do not do. That is, they present dismaying evidence that
the wellbeing of the people of Iraq was consistently sacrificed as a sup-
pressed side-effect of this American quest for political and economic dom-
inance in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a
metaphor for the twenty-first-century US imperial (mis)adventures
throughout the entire world. To be sure, the region was especially vulner-
able to imperial design, and a result, has vividly exhibited this state-destroying
and people-victimizing behavior by the United States. This
reflects several factors: oil geopolitics as its supreme strategic priority,
Israel’s junior hegemonic status as its unconditional domestic priority, and
the blowback threats of Islamic radicalism and expansion of Islamic influ-
ence in the region after the 9/11 attacks have shaped its security dialogue
at least until the Ukraine War. We can be most thankful to have such a
book for its insight, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, and for getting
right the complex story of America’s role in Iraq.
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
_ Richard Falk
Global Justice in the 21st Century 