Despite its long engagement in the Arab world and the wider Middle East, which as the previous article in this series showed goes back to the early 19th century, the US had never adopted a more transformative approach in dealing with the region than it did in the early 2000s.
Iraq witnessed the most ambitious American socio-political experiment in the region. Apart from the different ways in which the neo-conservative elite in Washington tried to sell the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 internally and justify it externally, the key idea behind the invasion was to utterly transform Iraq politically and economically.
America’s key decision-making institutions understood Iraq’s modern history and social dynamics. But perhaps the voices of the real experts in some of these institutions were marginalised to give room to those of the neo-conservatives, and perhaps a few Iraqi political adventurers sold some American politicians their own ambitions as the aspirations of wider social groups in Iraq. But America was neither deluded nor deceived in invading Iraq. It had a project that it wanted to implement and then to take to other parts of the region.
That project stemmed from seeing the modern Arab states, and especially the republics, as failed political entities that had oppressed their people, wasted resources, missed serious routes towards development, and ruined their economies. Their rule had built up anger and frustration among major segments of young people. And since, in this American understanding at that time, the political milieus of these Arab states were largely oppressive, some of that anger got channelled against the West.
The result has been not only potential attacks against Western assets, but also a social milieu that was generally hostile to the US. In this way of thinking, the real culprits behind the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington were not merely the young Arabs who did it, or militant Islamism as an ideology, but the failed states whose socio-political and economic realities had created fertile ground for such hatred and violence to grow.
As a result, this way of thinking said, America needed to not only punish the direct perpetrators of the attacks – Al-Qaeda and its host the Taliban in Afghanistan – but also, and at least equally importantly, to fix these countries themselves. Iraq, a vastly rich country whose resources were attractive as well as seemingly able to fund the project, was the beginning of this intervention.
It was not a surprise that in the first few years after its invasion of Iraq the US systematically dismantled the pillars upon which the modern Iraqi state had been built. These pillars were corroded after decades of mismanagement, corruption, and often shocking levels of incompetence. But whatever was left was dismantled.
However, in the socio-political landscape of the Arab world in the early and mid-2000s, America not only saw failed states, but also detected potential partners. The Islamist current in modern Arab politics has almost always had a pragmatic attitude towards the West, and especially towards the US. For at least two decades, and since the early 1980s, several Islamist movements from different parts of the Arab world and the wider Middle East had tried to build their presence in America, not only seeking economic opportunities, but also to present themselves to the power circles there.
As a result, despite the prevailing hostile rhetoric of most Islamist groups towards the US, the same groups adopted highly accommodating tones in their direct dealings with influential Americans. Gradually, a rapport was built, and some American power circles came to the understanding that they could do business with Arab and Middle Eastern Islamists.
The lack of real democracy in the vast majority of the Arab countries lent credence to that thinking. Many American think tanks promulgated in the mid-2000s the idea that the Islamists would win in virtually any free election in the region. Inherent in this idea was an assessment that the largest segments of the region’s societies saw religion as their primary, and often sole, frame of reference, and that all other political ideologies had shallow constituencies, largely amongst tiny intellectual groups in urban centres.
In this American way of thinking, if oppression was a key reason behind the pent-up anger that had got channelled towards the West, then promoting democracy was a key way to solve the problem and diffuse that anger. If elections brought the Islamists to power, that thinking went, America could deal with them.
Economics also played a role in this transformative American project. The Arab states that America wanted to “fix” in that period had decades of disastrous economic policies behind them, either blatantly socialist (acutely poorly executed) or anchored on an expansive role for the state in the economy. America understood that economics lay at the core of the frustrations and pent-up anger in these societies. And so, this thinking went, these economies needed to be “fixed” through major openings for the private sector in them.
However, the problem was that most of these economies largely lacked the structural foundations of genuine competitiveness and good governance. As a result, the push towards diluting the roles of the state in that period quickly resulted in skewed political economy landscapes in most of these countries, where a small number of families (with different links to the state) control major industries, often as quasi-oligopolies.
Iraq proved vastly more complex than most American strategists had assessed. The cost of the invasion was colossal in terms of blood and resources. Groups without any allegiance whatsoever to the ideals of the modern Arab state and claiming to adhere to some of the most austere interpretations of religion found open ground to entrench themselves and resurrect antiquated forms of rule in the region as a result.
The dismantling of the pillars of the modern state in Iraq during a time of chaos when bandits were let loose to loot and kill, and when Iraq’s colossal wealth was being plundered on a massive scale all opened wide cracks in society from which assertive sectarianism, and with it old grievances that had been largely buried in Iraq’s modern experience, came to the surface. Havoc prevailed in the country for almost 15 years.
America then came to understand that nation-building in the Middle East was a highly problematic endeavour and that military interventions in the region needed to be surgical and not on the long term and on such a scale. Surprisingly, however, most of the American assessments of the Iraq experiment at the end of the first decade of the 21st century focused on why some tactics had failed in Iraq, rather than on the credibility and soundness of the overall American project in the region over the preceding decade, of which the Iraq experiment was a part.
This proved consequential, since the Arab world and the wider Middle East was entering a very different phase in its modern history at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. This time around, the attempts to transform the modern Arab state came not from outside imperial projects, but from the eruption of internal pressures.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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