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 nineteenth century, America had never adopted a more transformative approach in dealing with the region than that it had in the early 2000s.

Iraq witnessed the most ambitious American socio-political experiment in the region. Apart from the different ways with which the neo-conservative elite in Washington DC had tried to sell the war internally and justify it externally, the key idea behind the invasion was utterly transforming Iraq, politically and economically.

America’s key decision institutions understood Iraq’s modern history and social dynamics. Perhaps the voices of the real experts in some of these institutions were marginalised to give room to those of the neo-conservatives; perhaps a few Iraqi political adventurers sold some American politicians their own ambitions as the aspirations of wide social groups in Iraq. But America was neither deluded nor deceived in invading Iraq. It had a project that it wanted to implement in Iraq, 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, ruined their economies, and whose rule had built up anger and frustration amongst 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 get channeled against the West. The result is not only potential attacks against Western assets, but a general social milieu hostile to the US. In this thinking, the real culprits behind the September 11 attacks were not merely the young Arabs who did it, or militant Islamism as an ideology, but in this understanding, the root causes were the failed states whose socio-political and economic realities had created fertile ground for such hatred and violence to grow in. And so, this thinking went, America needed to not only punish the direct perpetrators (al-Qaeda and its host, the Taliban in Afghanistan), but, at least equally important, to fix these countries. And Iraq (a vastly rich country whose resources were attractive as well as seemed able to fund the project) was the beginning.

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 Iraqi modern state was built. These pillars were corroded after decades of mismanagement, corruption, and often shocking levels of incompetence. Still, whatever was left was dismantled.

But in the 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, since the early 1980s, several Islamist movements from different parts of the Arab world and the wider Middle East, had tried to build presence in America, not only seeking economic opportunities, but also to present themselves to power circles there. And so, despite the prevailing hostile rhetoric of most Islamist groups towards the US, the same groups adopted in direct dealings with influential Americans, highly accommodating tones. Gradually, rapport was built, and some American power circles came to the understanding that they can do business with Arab and Middle Eastern Islamists.

The lack of real democracy in the vast majority of 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 see religion as their primary - and often sole - frame of reference, and that all other political ideologies have shallow constituencies, largely amongst tiny intellectual groups in urban centres, but, by and large, the Islamist movements would command the votes of the majorities in free elections. And so, if oppression was, in that American thinking then, a key reason behind the pent up anger that gets channeled towards the West, then promoting democracy was a key way to solve the problem and to diffuse that anger. And, if elections brought the Islamists to power, that thinking went, America could deal with them.

Economics 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, either blatantly socialist (with an acutely poor execution of socialism) or policies anchored on expansive roles of the state in the economy. America understood that economics lied at the core of the frustrations and pent up anger in these societies. And so, the thinking went, these economies needed to be fixed through major openings for the private sector in these countries. The problem was that most of these economies largely lacked the structural foundations of genuine competitiveness and good governance. An so the pushes towards diluting the roles of the states in that period quickly resulted in skewed political economy landscapes in most of these countries, where a small number of families (in several cases, with different links to the state) controlling major industries, often in quasi-oligopolies.

Iraq proved vastly more complex than most American strategists had assessed. The cost was colossal in 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 the region had not known for centuries. Crucially, the dismantling of the pillars of the modern state in Iraq, at a time of chaos, when bandits were loose looting and killing, and when Iraq’s colossal wealth was being plundered at mass scale - all opened wide cracks in society from which assertive sectarianism, and with it old grievances that were largely buried in Iraq’s modern experience, came to the surface. Havoc prevailed in the country for almost 15 years.

America came to the understanding that nation-building in the Middle East was a highly problematic endeavour and that military interventions in the region needed to be surgical, not long and vast. Surprisingly, however, most of the American assessments of the Iraq experiment at the end of the first decade of the twenty first 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 in the preceding decade, of which the Iraq experiment was part.

This proved consequential, for the Arab world and the wider Middle East was, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty first century, entering a very different phase in its modern history. This time the attempts to transform the modern Arab state came not from outside imperial projects, but from the eruption of internal pressures.