It was behind closed doors and with little fanfare that, in the summer of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority handed sovereign authority to the recently elected Iraqi Interim Government. This muted act of colonial magnanimity belied the profound challenge that the occupation authority left to their inheritors. The new, ostensibly liberated Iraqi state inherited a broken and scattered security apparatus, a burgeoning and increasingly violent insurgency, and a completely eviscerated social security system. This paper tells the story of how Iraqi politicians and bureaucrats within the nascent state’s civil service ministries (Veterans Affairs, Ministry of Human Rights, The Martyrdom Foundation, Political Prisoner Foundation etc.) struggled with these realities, and amongst themselves, to build a new, post-Ba’athist Iraqi state out of the detritus of the ancien regime. The paper follows how these ministries enacted an intersecting set of governance practices, legal frameworks, each couched in impassioned narratives of nationhood rooted to varying degrees in political Islam, free-market economics, crony-capitalism, ideals of global governance, and humanitarianism. Pulling on textual and visual media produced by Iraqi ministries, legal developments, and internal debates that took place from 2004-2010 amongst civil service bureaucrats and the institutions that housed them, this paper suggests that nationalist, religious, and social service politics being enacted in Iraq at this time are not simply an effect of its occupation and the presence of proxies, but a crucible in which political theories were being reorganized and reimagined. Little attention has been paid in the scholarship to the ways in which different sectors of Iraqi society appealed to the Iraqi state in the post 2003-invasion years, and which strategies of governance, narratives of political life, and visions of society were presented to Iraqis by its political class to bolster and justify their rule. This elision has produced an image of Iraq’s political life, and the political theories and practices that animated it, as wholly or in large part dominated and enacted by external political, social, or (neo-)imperial meddling. This framing does little to help us understand the nature of domestic Iraqi politics, nor how notions of sovereignty, the nation, state, and human rights were variously put to work and reformulated in novel ways by Iraqis, and in turn what Iraqi politics can tell us about contemporary theories of state and governance.