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Initiated in response to the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan formed part of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror but they were also a strategic response to the United States' long hegemonic decline. In its chaotic withdrawal some 20 years later, the US had accelerated the disorganization and chaos in the very societies it sought to pacify and rebuild.
Whereas much has been written about the military campaigns, this book focuses on the occupations of Iraq (2003–11) and Afghanistan (2001–21) as part of the processes of global political economy. Private contracts for reconstruction projects were lucrative, unregulated and unsupervised and largely led to the further degradation of infrastructure and immiseration of the occupied territories. Corruption and neoliberal accumulation thrived. Neoliberalism is shown to have been a core driver of the rationalization of America's wars of intervention, which presented an economic opportunity too good to miss.
Bülent Gökay is Professor of International Relations at Keele University. He is chair of the editorial committee of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies and Founding Editor of the Journal of Global Faultlines.
Foreword by Rob B. J. Walker
Introduction
1. The Changing Architecture of Power
2. Setting the Stage: US National Security Strategy
3. Project for the New American Century: Where Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism Meet
4. Neoliberalism and 9/11
5. Neoliberal State Building in Afghanistan
6. US Invasion and the Neoliberal Modernization of Iraq
7. The ‘Human Terrain System’ and Neoliberal Governance
8. Outsourcing the War on Terror
9. Conclusion: Military Pacification and Economic Immiseration