Book Review “Pax Americana: Unending War on Iraq”

This book discusses Iraqi-American relations since the end of the Cold War, focusing on Iraq as a central theme rather than the policies of successive American administrations. It deeply examines the consequences of American foreign policy on Iraqis and others in the Middle East. The book adopts a calm tone but is filled with anger over the price Iraqis have had to pay over the years to align with American views on how the Middle East should appear. By focusing on these two aspects of the unequal relationship between the United States and Iraq, the authors precisely portray the impact of American policies on Iraq and its people.

The book offers a scathing critique of American foreign and military policy in the Middle East since the Gulf War (1990-1991), exposing the false narratives surrounding democracy promotion and human rights, while presenting the regional instability that Washington has left behind. Additionally, it documents international organizations’ testimonies regarding the impact of American foreign policy on Iraq, revealing part of the mosaic of misery and destruction that American policies and wars have inflicted on Iraq, although it sometimes lacks the context necessary to understand why this has happened. Political commentary often lacks a unifying context and ignores the recurring pattern of Iraqi grievances, regardless of which political party controls the White House. This book takes a broader perspective to reveal the persistent pattern connecting specific events.

Authors of the Book

Three researchers who are experts in American policy in the Middle East co-authored the book. The first author, Jacqueline Ismail (1942-2023), who passed away before its publication, was a professor of social work at the University of Calgary in Canada and editor of the “International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies.” She published extensively in social policy and international welfare and co-authored several works with her husband, Tareq Ismail, who is originally from Iraq. Some of these works include “The Iraqi Predicament” (2004), “Government and Politics in the Contemporary Middle East” (2016, 2023), and “Iraq in the 21st Century” (2017). She also collaborated with William Haddad to edit “Barriers to Reconciliation: Case Studies on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (2006).

The second author, Tareq Ismail, is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and editor of the journal “Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World.” He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous works on Iraq and the Middle East, including “Iraq: The Human Cost of History” (2003), “Cultural Cleansing: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned, and Academics Killed” (2010), and “International Relations in the Contemporary Middle East” (2014).

The third author, Leslie MacDonald, worked as an expert at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, advising on research design and editing many works by Tareq and Jacqueline Ismail. He is also a co-editor of the journal “Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World.” The book’s five chapters are introduced by Professor Richard Falk, an expert in international law and international relations at Princeton and California universities, and a former United Nations rapporteur on human rights in Palestine.

Chapters of the Book

Chapter One – American Peace and the Fragmentation of Arab States: Covers issues such as the ills of American peace, the Gulf War (1991) as the beginning of a new era, shifts in American policy from “dual containment” to “regime change,” the occupation of Iraq and the new regime, and the American peace in the Middle East since 1990.

Chapter Two – Iraq Is Burning: Discusses various topics including the end of “terrorist-sponsoring states,” “New Iraq” from the perspective of neoconservative ideology, forms of state cessation in Iraq from theory to practice, death squads as a tool of foreign policy, the centrality of oil in American politics, state destruction and chaos in Palestine through the Israeli model, cultural cleansing through engineered chaos, the planned chaos in Iraq and Syria, and the social consequences of ending the state in Iraq.

Chapter Three – Kurdistan and the Iraqi State: Focuses on the failure to secure a democratic state post-Baath, corruption and human rights violations, the promotion of sectarian Islamic factions, exile opposition, lost opportunities for building a federal Iraq, and the historical failure of the Kurds to establish their own state.

Chapter Four – Two Faces of American Peace: Begins with an overview of factors leading to the rise of American peace, moves on to what it calls the Empire of Lies and Chaos, and concludes with the decline of American peace.

Chapter Five, the concluding chapter, starts by observing signs of sectarianism and political stasis in Iraq, then addresses American peace through NATO expansion wars, the fog surrounding the future of the American empire, and concludes with the challenges posed by the BRICS group and the “Axis of Resistance” to American policy.

Most discussions about the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq have centered around notions of crimes and mistakes, while there is no shortage of crimes and errors, nor in the use of the latter as a pretext to avoid condemnation. However, the wars in Iraq that began in 1990 can be better understood as part of an imperial project of “American peace” to fortify the Middle East against the potential threat of any regional challenge to American power. Establishing “American peace” involved violence and deception, both overt and covert methods, direct and indirect force through proxies, sometimes willingly and other times manipulatively. The complexity of this web of causes and effects invariably leads to self-deception over time, imposing heavy costs on the imperial project and threatening its survival.

Shock and Awe

In his introduction to the book, Professor Richard Falk reminds us of the U.S. government’s failure to use diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine and the ongoing project to achieve geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of both the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. He also recalls the continuing active American complicity in the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.

This book serves as a grim reminder of the precedent set by the U.S. war on Iraq; the United States adopted a criminal path in its lengthy invasion and occupation of Iraq, starting from the aggressive “Shock and Awe” campaign, culminating in a state-building project that ultimately produced ISIS in the region. It represents a colossal geopolitical failure over more than a decade of occupation, portrayed brilliantly with great insight and wisdom. While the book succeeds in presenting the complex story of America’s role in Iraq, the simple intellectual question persists: why does America refuse to learn from past tragic failures?

Imperial Vision

It is observed that references to America’s war on Iraq (2003) in the West often come from leftist or anti-war political actors. These actors emphasize that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was anticipated based on the precedent set by the American-British invasion of Iraq and the ensuing long controversial occupation. However, the mainstream in the West attempts to erase this American experience from collective memory. Those citing Iraq as a relevant precedent to Ukraine provide justified critiques of the imperial nature of American foreign policy, which disregards international law and United Nations charters, using them merely to rally international opposition to Russia, while mobilizing global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and substantial donations and economic aid to Kyiv.

Such a decontextualized and self-centered European imperial vision carries a hefty price, for Iraq loses its essential truth as a state inhabited by people who have endured the trials of tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The United States’ refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South, especially in Middle Eastern countries, as confirmed by its complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, remains an important precedent in the political discourse surrounding Ukraine. Yet it is far from telling the full story of Iraq’s suffering and its grim modern history over the past eight decades. From this perspective, the book critiques the destructive American role in Iraq during 20 years of poorly planned aggression, but it does much more; it provides a thorough and precise dissection of the grievances endured by the Iraqi people since their country was invaded in 2003.

Placing the war within its historical context, and refusing to erase the terrible impact it has had on the reality of the population, their political consciousness, and civil life in Iraq, makes this work a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understanding offered by this analysis is deeper than superficial assessments based on a simplistic “invasion-occupation” model. This work values the integration of political and economic interests with serious attention to the social, ethical, and even artistic and philosophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural legacy. It is this legacy that has been shattered by the American invasion amidst the fragmentation of the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.

Fragmentation of Arab States and Its Human Consequences

In addressing American peace and the fragmentation of Arab states and its human consequences, the book evaluates three decades of American dominance over Arab states in the Gulf and Middle East region. Since its direct military intervention in the Kuwait War in 1990, the United States has increasingly engaged in engineering the region by promoting the adoption of a neoliberal economic and financial model while effectively supporting authoritarian regimes in reality, and raising slogans of freedom, democracy, and human rights in propaganda.

While the public diplomatic justification for the American intervention in Iraq in 1990 and 1991 primarily revolved around the notion of a defensive war to protect the territorial integrity of Kuwait and reinforce national sovereignty standards and the sanctity of borders, the years that followed witnessed an expansion of American military activity in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, along with a proliferation of military bases across Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman).

Engaging in policies in the region throughout the Cold War, the United States enhanced its presence between 1990 and 2019, becoming a leader in regional policy through a network of relations with regional states. However, the humanitarian impacts of these policies on the people of the region during this period have been overwhelmingly negative, with noticeable declines in most indicators such as economic well-being, security, safety, and health. The state apparatus established after the withdrawal of European empires is now in a state of ruin, whether in Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Yemen. As these countries fail to provide protection for their citizens, the peoples of the region face a perilous future, especially with the growing roles and influences of various non-state actors.

The True Beginning

The authors utilize their accumulated expertise and extensive knowledge of Iraqi affairs to provide a critical perspective on American policy in the Middle East. This profound book casts light on the disasters that have befallen Iraq due to confusing behavior and the flawed application of American hard and soft power over decades. It rightly places the tactics and geopolitical strategies of the United States in context to explain a range of concerning contemporary issues worldwide.

The authors successfully clarify the relationship between American ambitions for global and regional hegemony and the series of tragic events that led to Iraq’s dismemberment and destruction, extending beyond its borders to cause similar forms of devastation elsewhere in the region. The narrative offered by the book on this interconnectedness shows that the American agenda in Iraq goes beyond mere aggression followed by occupation aimed at “liberating it from tyranny” and “building a democratic state” to unleash “development dynamics.”

The authors argue that studying the contemporary tragedy in Iraq should not begin, as most assessments do, with the 1991 and 2003 wars and their resulting chaos and harsh sanctions, but instead should look at the spiral of events that began in 1963. The true starting point, which is often overlooked or concealed, is the CIA-assisted coup in 1963 that toppled Abdul Karim Qasim’s regime and ushered in the Ba’ath party, which ultimately led to Saddam Hussein’s leadership.

The personal history of one of the book’s authors, Tareq Ismail, living in exile since that coup and the scars left by those events of six decades, culminating in the massacre of intellectuals and the arrest of at least 5,000 Iraqi political activists, adds special significance to this narrative, bringing to the forefront events barely remembered by specialists, let alone the general public.

The Ba’ath coup in Iraq in 1963 reminds us of the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with the secret help and encouragement of the CIA. The Iranian coup preceded the Iraqi coup by about ten years, restoring the Shah to the Peacock Throne, along with the foreign ownership of Iran’s oil industry, benefiting American energy companies. The true nature of those events in both oil-producing countries was concealed under a flimsy fig leaf of justifications that prevailed during the Cold War.

During that period, the U.S. claimed it sought to rescue the region from communist control and diminish the influence of Marxist-Soviet socialism, which aimed to undermine Western strategic interests in the Middle East and establish Stalinist-style states. The official propaganda broadcasted by ideologically compliant Western media downplayed the strategic motivations behind those policies, which essentially sought to keep the region’s energy reserves under Western (safe) control, tasking American oil production with responsibility for them. In the context of those policies, the sovereign nations’ rights to self-determination were ignored, and the peoples of the region experienced various forms of suffering, depicted as a result of revolutions from nationalist forces rather than reflecting the maneuvers of the CIA. Years later, the CIA’s effective role was widespread.

Furthermore, the book highlights the fundamental differences between U.S. interventions aimed at regime change from 1959 to 1990 and those that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The former interventions aimed to covertly disrupt self-determination policies and were executed secretly, thus entrusted to the CIA and cooperating local elites in targeted countries for regime change.

The only explicit exception during the Cold War occurred in two wars in divided states, Korea and Vietnam. International fault lines were crossed through “corrective” actions taken by rival nationalist forces seeking to reunite the divided states. In other places, the United States tried to disable what it opposed by acting from outside the theater, relying on cooperating local elements to shape states according to an American vision.

Justifying American Intervention

After the Cold War, the dynamics of intervention in the Middle East became overtly military, linked to arms sales and predatory globalization. The U.S. sought to legitimize these overt interventions in the United Nations and attempted to justify them by international humanitarian law or the necessity to combat insurgency and address alleged terrorist threats. Among the justifications put forth in 2003 for violating Iraq’s borders and sovereignty were claims of possessing non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret nuclear weapons development program. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan was justified by the claim that Afghanistan had become a safe haven for international terrorism. In Libya, the intervention occurred under an urgent “humanitarian” pretext to rescue populations besieged by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi.

When the U.S. failed to gain international legitimacy for its intervention, as in the case of the Iraq invasion (2003) and the Kosovo War (1999), it intervened publicly with its allies, feeling no requirement for the secrecy employed during the Cold War. When the United Nations Security Council rejected Washington’s request to authorize the use of force in Iraq, George W. Bush declared that if the UN withheld its approval of American war plans, the international organization would find itself irrelevant. Unfortunately, Bush was somewhat correct, as America’s wars and interventions found their way onto the international stage without any real hindrance.

State-Building!

The book reviews the course of state rebuilding in Iraq by an occupying foreign power. The authors demonstrate, through a detailed presentation of this process, that the American policies enacted had the opposite effect of what they claimed to aim for, which was “state-building.” What happened in reality was that the American occupation destroyed Iraq and eliminated the prospects of building a unified and stable state capable of ensuring security, safeguarding rights, and achieving development.

Systematic policies and practices led to the dismantling of the pillars of governmental stability that existed in Iraq before 2003. The occupation “purged” the armed forces and state bureaucracy of its highly professional “Sunni” personnel from the previous Ba’ath regime and turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and artifacts, undermining the foundations of cultural identity and national consciousness. This approach allowed a wide range of grievances and sub-identities to fester alongside bitter competition among religious factions and ethnic minorities. The authors clarify that “state-building” in Iraq was in fact “the end of the state,” where the role of occupation notably intensified sectarian conflict, the spread of extremism, rising rates of poverty and crime, and a proliferation of corruption and chaos.

For these reasons, the authors of the book believe that the process of “state rebuilding” in Iraq should be viewed as a process of “ending the state” or “state disintegration.” Their argument is that this outcome is not a failure of the occupation policy, but rather a deliberately orchestrated success. This orchestration reflects the “deep state” view in America of the Middle East, aligning with Israeli beliefs that regional security—both Israeli and American—lies not in amassing weapons but in keeping regional states weak, divided, and preoccupied with their contradictions, crises, and internal conflicts.

Geopolitical Hypocrisy

In a chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority, the book adds further details to explain how the occupation distorted the state of Iraq, showing that the U.S. and Israel worked to bolster Kurdish aspirations for independence in ways that undermined their sense of belonging to Iraq and threatened the unified national identity of the Iraqi people. This feeling is vital for any project aiming to build a successful state.

The book tackles the geopolitical hypocrisy surrounding the American role in Iraq from a partisan perspective that historically traces back to President John F. Kennedy’s promotion of the Ba’ath coup against Abdul Karim Qasim’s regime in 1963 and extends to the efforts by George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush to wage war against a state that had previously been their client. We must remember that under Saddam Hussein’s leadership, Iraq was convinced in 1980 to attack Iran in a devastating war that lasted eight years, partly fueled by U.S. arms sales to both sides and American political support for Saddam’s regime to prevent his defeat.

Moreover, a decade later, Saddam Hussein received ambiguous signals from U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, about American views on launching an attack on Kuwait, only to see Iraq subjected to international condemnation by President George H.W. Bush, Saddam’s Arab neighbors, the United Nations, and the Security Council, as a pretext for legitimizing the “Desert Storm” assault in 1991. After 12 years of comprehensive sanctions that devastated the lives of the population and threatened their livelihoods, the U.S. invaded Iraq under the banner of “shock and awe,” establishing a direct occupation for several years.

The authors of “The American Peace: An Endless War on Iraq” have provided a complex and nuanced narrative as few commentators and experts have done regarding Iraq, offering shocking evidence that the well-being of the Iraqi people has consistently been sacrificed as a muted side effect of this American pursuit of political and economic hegemony in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a model for American imperial adventures in the 21st century across the globe. The region has undoubtedly been perpetually susceptible to imperial scheming for many years, highlighted by:

• The geopolitics of oil as the highest strategic priority.
• The regional dominance of Israel as an unconditional American local priority.
• The threats posed by Islamic radicalism and the expansion of Islamic influence in the region following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

These factors have at least shaped American security interests up until the Ukraine War.

Conclusion

Jacqueline Ismail, who passed away earlier this year, and Tareq Ismail, her writing partner and Iraqi-born husband, dedicated their academic lives to dismantling the American narrative about Iraq. Together, they created an ambitious academic infrastructure that made significant contributions to Iraqi studies, including establishing a scholarly journal, organizing international conferences, and publishing several books. Perhaps most importantly, they formed an international community of scholars committed to exploring lesser-known yet integral aspects of Iraq’s complex experience over the past century.

These high-quality studies should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Washington, D.C., think tanks that provide the U.S. government with lists of policy options that generally satisfy the Department of Defense and dominant foreign policy platforms.

In contrast, the authors’ approach is considered objective and encourages others to adopt interdisciplinary patterns of inquiry and evaluation. This work also values the integration of political and economic interests with a serious focus on the social, ethical, and even artistic and philosophical dimensions of Iraq’s exceptional cultural heritage. It is this heritage that was shattered due to Iraq’s historically troubled encounters with America amidst the fragmentation of the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.

Book Information

Title: The American Peace: An Endless War on Iraq

Authors: Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, Leslie T. MacDonald

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2024

Language: English

Edition: First

Pages: 232