Shortly after the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power in 2003, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a local governance program to train Iraqis in American-style democracy by creating neighborhood, district, and provincial councils throughout the country. USAID allocated $807 million dollars to this project, and within the first six months, 88 neighborhood councils with a total of 1500 council members were established in Baghdad alone. Council members were rapidly trained in how to run meetings according to Robert’s Rules by a U.S. army reservist whose credentials included the fact that had once served as a mayor of a small town in Colorado with a population of less than 5,000 people. The responsibilities of these new neighborhood and district councils include receiving citizen complaints, responding to electricity outages or sewage problems, and registering residents for their monthly food rations. In spite of challenges from funding shortages, security threats, and sectarian violence, these councils continue to operate today. Yet despite the peculiar origins of Baghdad’s neighborhood councils and the significant roles they have played in residents’ lives, these councils have not yet been the subject of scholarly analysis nor viewed within the historical context of Ba‘thist governance structures. Prior research about state-society relations in Ba‘thist Iraq has revealed that neighborhood Ba‘th Party offices existed under Saddam to carry out functions similar to the councils set up later by the Americans: Ba‘thists fielded complaints from residents, addressed problems with essential services, and registered Iraqis for food rations. Could it be that Americans reinvented the wheel by establishing new councils that closely mirrored the very Ba‘th Party institutions they dissolved? Or did Iraqis, having certain expectations about what a local government office should deliver, shape the functions of the councils to more closely resemble their predecessors? The aim of this paper is to articulate how U.S. neoconservative ideologies about democracy promotion and state-building played out on the micro scale across Baghdad’s neighborhoods, revealing a considerable disconnect between what U.S. policymakers imagined for a new democracy in Iraq and the actual power structures that were created (or recreated) within Baghdad’s neighborhoods. This paper is based on fieldwork in Iraq, Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives, interviews with Iraqi neighborhood council members in Baghdad, and interviews and documents from the U.S. soldiers responsible for creating neighborhood and district councils in Baghdad after 2003.