In the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) sectarian discourses have played an important role at a number of pivotal moments. With increasing European domination of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European states fought wars of position against one another by sponsoring particular local religious groups as a means of embodying their political claims. As a consequence, European rivalries became sutured onto local identity in new ways. Then, as hegemony turned to direct rule, colonial powers deeply imbued the political entities they created with sectarian norms. Legal personhood was mediated by religious identity. Ironically, the liberal norms guiding the accompanying colonial civilizing projects foregrounded the idea of freedom of religion and the protection of minorities. In so doing, religious identity, imagined now in sectarian terms, became a site for the intervention of the imperial hegemon as the guarantor of religious liberty and as a safeguard for religious minorities. But sectarianism also played an important role in various anti-colonial nationalist movements across the region. Likewise, it had a role in state-building and in the construction of citizenship regimes in post-colonial states across the region. Despite this complicated history, the present dispensation of sectarian discourse in the MENA is unprecedented in scope. It has become ubiquitous in ways unimaginable even twenty-five years ago. It headlines the political maneuvering of regional actors from Iraqi politicians to the Saudi royal family to the Israeli, Bahraini and Syrian governments to say nothing of the Islamic State which celebrated its sectarianism. My paper traces the current irruption of sectarian discourses across the region to the American-led Iraq invasion and its aftermath.

Looking back on it twenty years later, this paper argues that the US decision to engage in a war for regime change in Iraq in 2003 was less a mistake by a US president that was shortsighted and ideologically committed than a product of the US failing to ever consider a post-Cold War approach to the Middle East in terms other than imposing a US-led regional hegemonic order. As a result, the US invasion that violated international norms helped unleash new dynamics of regional intervention, lethal technologies and forms of warfare. Drawing on James C. Scott’s critique of high modernist planning in the 20th century, this paper explores how the US effort to use the 2003 war as a mean to reorder the Middle East can be understood like other misguided imperial or hegemonic projects that seek to establish new material structures and social orders. We can use Scott’s analysis of high modernist efforts to impose order to offer similar lessons about the failure of US efforts to order the Middle East as US policymakers relied on representational simplifications, were overconfidence in US technical capabilities, deployed coercive power, and failed to accommodate resistance to their plans. US policy was blind to the political dynamics at the regional and domestic levels and consistently rejected alternative options for building regional order. The paper then maps the consequences using Scott’s observation that the populations that planners seek to order often develop in reaction forms of practical knowledge, informal processes and improvisions that they use to navigate the unstable and unpredictable environment they inhabit. In this context, the states and organizations best able to develop and manage networks of self-organized actors -- such as Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its allied militias, US special forces, and armed jihadist groups including the ISIS – have been the ones best able expand their power and influence producing a complex of rival, overlapping networks of influence. As a result, efforts to promote security, let alone regional order, have become difficult and precarious.

One of the main properties conventionally attributed to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was its unsanctioned, illegal character. In lacking UN authorization, the invasion is said to have suspended institutions and grammars of liberal internationalism, contributed to the demise of the international legal order, and renewed wars of aggression or the “just wars” of the western tradition. Under this logic, the invasion of Iraq was paradoxically an international event which simultaneously signaled the end of a proper international legal order. It was difficult to tell which destruction was more significant to liberal western sensibilities: the destruction of a country and a society already shattered by years of sanctions or the destruction of a presumed international legal system. As the occupation settled in, Iraq turned into an entirely domestic affair, despite the involvement of regional and other forces. Meanwhile, in Palestine something similar was happening. The PLO, following the Algerian model, always sought to internationalize the Question of Palestine. The arrival of the PA in the West Bank and Gaza prefigured the imminent materialization of a proper international actor: the state of Palestine. But in 2003, the same US president who led the invasion of Iraq, would announce his plan for a “roadmap for peace in the Middle East.” Disappointed with Arafat’s support for the Second Intifada, George Bush demanded that Arafat appoint a prime minister in “a real position of authority.” Banned from travel and besieged in his headquarters, Arafat appointed Abu Mazin. The US released the road map and presented it as an internationally brokered effort, while the siege on Arafat’s headquarters gestured to Palestine’s domestication, confinement, and separation from the rest of the world. The Iraqi invasion and these peace-making efforts in Palestine, were said to lack international legitimacy and instead fortified a new era of US imperial power. This paper argues that rather than engendering the collapse of internationalism, these efforts reenacted international juridical grammars, which, I also argue operated through domestication. The confinement, enclosure, and domestication of Palestine (and of Iraq) are not the opposites of internationalization but its modes of operation. The imperial’s intertwinement with the international is necessary to understand if conditions of domestication, siege, and confinement are to be struggled against. The paper tracks the paradoxes of a political struggle unfolding under such conditions of internationalized domestication.

The 2003 US-led war on Iraq under the banner of the “war on terror’ represented a pivotal moment in the transformation of both the international order and the regional order across the Middle East. It set in motion a series of violent confrontations and interventions that sought to impose a new US order, and in turn engendered resistances by state and non-state actors across the region. This paper considers the impact of the 2003 Iraq war once the US gaze turned to Lebanon starting in 2004, internationalizing a domestic standoff with a view to re-engineering the Lebanese state, eliminating Hizbullah and ultimately weaken Syrian and Iran. When the initial interventions by the United Nations failed, Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 with full US backing. I argue that, far from just another battle over southern Lebanon, the 2006 Lebanon war represented the global struggle for and against US domination of the region that had begun with the 2003 Iraq war. Israel’s military failure during 2006 led to the consolidation of Hizbullah as a core part of the “Resistance” front on a regional scale. What followed was a major shift in regional alliances as an increasingly insecure Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states pushed back on Iran’s regional ordering influence, and, I argue, moved them to accept formal normalization with Israel under a reconsolidated US order.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S., U.K. and their “coalition of the willing” has significantly shaped the world we live in today – especially as regards geopolitics. Arguably, the no single regime benefited more from the aftermath of the Iraq war than the Islamic Republic of Iran. The invasion left in its wake a massive regional power vacuum that was swiftly, ably, and ruthlessly exploited by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Sepah Pasdaran), stretching from the southwestern banks of the Tigris river to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Through its elite branch, the Qods Force, the IRGC not only cultivated formidable networks of patronage and mercenaries among Shi’a communities in the region, but also set about centralizing economic and political power inside Iran. In short, the Iraq war was the single biggest catalyst for the development of a security-military-industrial complex inside Iran under the auspices of the IRGC. Although the rise of IRGC is a much discussed topic in foreign policy and think tank circles, it is both curious and revealing that it is hardly considered as a direct consequence of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. This paper recounts the rise of the security state in Iran through a direct examination of the imprint of the Iraq war on the regional and domestic dialectics of power that have fundamentally transformed the Islamic Republic. These transformations, the paper argues, shed glaring lights on the regime’s crises of legitimacy today.