Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
In Iraq today, the United States is presiding over a country about which it has a limited understanding. The United States is attempting to rebuild Iraqi state institutions and reform their interaction with society. Post–Cold War military interventions into failed or rogue states with the overt aim of reforming their political systems are becoming increasingly common but, to date, these interventions have been uniformly unsuccessful. It is not surprising therefore, that attention is increasingly being focused on Britain’s own inadequate attempts to build a modern democratic state in Iraq during the eighteen-year period between 1914 and 1932.
At the beginning of a very hot Iraqi summer I interviewed a senior British diplomat in the garden of what had been the British High Commission on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad. He was optimistic, even bullish. The lawlessness that had been the focus of much media coverage over the previous month was, he said, overstated. Order would soon return to the capital’s streets and the country beyond. Criticism, both Iraqi and international, of the nascent representative structures being fostered by the occupying powers was inaccurate. They were not, as detractors argued, dominated by an irrelevant minority of carpetbaggers, but were instead the foundations of a democratic process that would slowly evolve into a vibrant and sustainable polyarchy—a stable coordinated rule of multiple institutions representing diverse social forces and interests... | 
