This paper examines the US state-building project in Iraq, not as an external imposition, but as a manifestation of a modern phenomenon of political engineering. State-building, a set of practices and forms of knowledge that are constantly produced and re-produced in academic and policy centers, is involved in perpetual forms of interpreting and intervening on the empirical reality in order to shape a particular order (the “state”). Interventions in the name of state-building act on all aspects of the state’s life: national narratives, legal, institutional and political arrangements and the “things” that make the state viable—buildings to house state functions, pipelines to feed the economy, methods of border-control to protect “sovereignty,” sewage systems to maintain public health, and, among many other things, an electrical grid to illuminate spaces and power economic activities. This paper examines how state-building assembles its object (the state). Instead of started from the desired end result, a reified state, and then judging the results in a backwards fashion, I begin from a site in which things, institutions, technologies, narratives, violence and expert knowledge are assembled together and maintained to help produce a new stately order: the electrical grid. Under the US occupation, the electrical sector was the recipient of the largest amount of reconstruction aid. Electricity was important not just for illumination and powering of machinery, but also for oil production—the country’s main source of income. The grid, which connected the country together in a network of wires, transmitters, transformers and generators, is a knot in a web of things, experts, narratives and technologies that are assembled together to (re-)build the state. Before examining the case study, the paper begins by placing state-building in an historical context as a political technology articulated in response to perceived global pressing political and security issues, and at the same time has deep affinities with academic knowledge production about the state. This article uses US government investigation reports as primary source material in constructing the case study. Methodologically, it draws on approaches borrowed from the studies of science and technology used in recent studies of political and economic engineering (e.g. Timothy Mitchell, Stephen Collier, Patrick Carroll; Andrew Barry). Theoretically, I follow a tradition that challenges the view that sees the state as a bounded and cohesive entity, and rather examines the sources of its agency and constant formation on the ground (e.g. Philip Abrams; Timothy Mitchell; Pierre Bourdieu).