ABSTRACT
Six years after the US-led invasion, the situation in Iraq remains precarious. While some improvements in security could be seen following the ‘surge’ of US troops that started in 2007, Iraq’s future stability cannot be taken for granted. The US-led intervention in Iraq has been profoundly transformative. At the national, regional and international levels alike, the invasion of Iraq and its subsequent post-war experience caused a transformation of security at these inter-related levels that has not, as yet, stabilized. The situation in Iraq is often considered through the intellectual prism of security.
This is understandable considering Iraq’s geopolitical significance. With proven petroleum reserves of 113 billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia, Iraq has inherent strategic value for the world’s economy (Alnaswari 1994; Alkadiri 2001; Energy Information Administration 2007). Nevertheless, its geographic position has tended to overshadow even its immense natural wealth when considering the regional security dimension. Iraq has proven to be a vital component of the Middle East security infrastructure particularly since the 1970s, with Arab states and Western powers alike viewing the country as a strategic bulwark against the Islamic Republic of Iran, only for Iraq itself to be viewed as an equal, if not greater threat following the end of the First Gulf War with Iran, when Baghdad’s attention turned toward Kuwait in 1990. It is to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that the immediate causes of the current security
problems can be traced. Though Saddam Hussein’s regime survived the routing of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 by a US-led coalition, Iraq was not rehabilitated within the international system. Instead, the Ba’ath regime of Iraq was considered to be a pariah in the international community (Niblock 2002) and later identified as an agent of insecurity. In the aftermath of the al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001, US policymakers promoted the idea of regime change and the reconstruction of the Iraqi state as a ‘beacon’ of neoliberal democracy at the heart of the Middle East (Anderson and Stansfield 2005). This chapter focuses on the breakdown of security in Iraq following the invasion of 2003,
considering the interplay of indigenous Iraqi political forces and external US policies. The emergence of communal-based politics in Iraq is discussed together with the impact of these changes upon the regional security architecture of the Middle East. The chapter
concludes with an assessment of the situation from the perspective of early 2009, identifying the variables that may influence Iraq’s development in the future and the role of the US. In order to make sense of the situation in Iraq, the spatial layering of security concerns has some utility as an analytical framework operating across three discrete but overlapping spheres – domestic, regional and international.
