The rebellions sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa face new modalities of political control that are constituent parts of “Global Capitalism.” Characterized by the transnationalization of production and the social relations of production, Global Capitalism introduced three innovations of political control. The first is neo-liberal development strategies. These strategies achieved hegemony among development agencies worldwide, making neo-liberalism objective economic science rather than an ideology and thus beyond contestation or deliberation. The second is the mainly legal process by which economic decision-making is made autonomous from the “public” and put in the hands of a technocratic cadre. This takes economic decision-making away from popular accountability and opens up the economy to disciplining by market forces. The third innovation is “democracy promotion” or more precisely the promotion of polyarchy as the model for the state. Polyarchy, sold as “democracy,” is the curtailing of democracy to an institutional understanding and limiting it to the public act of choosing between different elites in ritualized electoral processes. The combined effect of these strategies is to undermine, co-opt, and otherwise neutralize counter hegemonic movements. I lay out the argument above using the case of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Through a detailed study of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the laws they implemented and their relationship with Iraqi political elite, I show how these strategies of political control were able to bring together a neo-liberal historic bloc in Iraq and undermine possible counter hegemonic movements. I suggest that the Iraqi experience can serve as a model and a warning for counter-hegemonic and oppositional movements.