This document discusses the failed imposition of institutions and governance on Iraq following the 2003 U.S. invasion. It describes Saddam Hussein's authoritarian rule and oppression of ethnic groups in Iraq. After the invasion, the Coalition Provisional Authority systematically dismantled Iraq's bureaucracy and barred Baath party members from government roles. This created a power vacuum and divided Iraqi society along sectarian lines, intensifying violence and insurgencies. The imposed democratic institutions did not serve Iraqi interests and further divided its people instead of uniting them.

1. Royce Morales
PSCI 4660.001
Mason
4/16/15
Final Draft
It is important for polities throughout space and time to develop institutions
founded upon ideals that suit their particular society. Whenever an exogenous actor
makes those institutional choices for a state, and ‘imposes’ certain governmental
preferences on it, this becomes problematic. The state, more than likely administratively
weak and unorganized, is at a vulnerable point when exogenous actors are able to
manipulate their institutions to either meet the exogenous actors’ interests or the interests
of the international community. Such is the case of Iraq: authoritarian dictator Saddam
Hussein becomes president in 1979, and embarks on a series of military and Baath Party
purges along with numerous human rights violations against other ethnic groups. As Iraq
had to deal with sanctions throughout the 1990s from the UN due to their invasion of
Kuwait, the whole infrastructure of the country began to crumble, Saddam’s patronage
ring could not afford to hold up the bureaucracy and the economic sector at the same time
while fending off an impending United States invasion. With Saddam forced to go into
hiding and all of Iraq’s assets frozen, Shi’a Islamic forces and other groups no longer
feared the Baathi National Guard, and were able to fight the United States on their own.
The U.S.-led invasion, coercive in nature with over three hundred thousand soldiers, was
more than enough for Iraqis of all ethnic groups to not only use the lawlessness of the
country to fight U.S. soldiers, but also competing ethnic and religious groups as well. As
the United States occupied Baghdad and celebrated victoriously, the Iraqi bureaucracy
was systematically dismantled by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) who
prohibited members of the Baath Party, the technocrats of Iraqi society, from occupying
seats in government or state owned enterprises. The CPA, which consisted of the
invasion forces: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland, enacted
orders to determine which ethnic and religious groups and how many could hold
governmental seats and administrative positions. The CPA wanted to bring democracy to
Iraq, and instill democratic institutions in the country, while practicing undemocratic
tendencies and creating more opposition in Iraqi society, and further dividing the country
along sectarian lines. The CPA imposing institutional choice on Iraq led to intensified
insurgencies across the country, growing disdain of United States occupation, and
helplessness of silenced Iraqi citizens. In my paper, I am going to explain four
characteristics that caused the failure of the ‘imposed’ government on Iraq: Saddam’s
rule of terror, U.S. occupation, forced sectarian divides in government, and the
aggregated outcome of them altogether. This paper is going to consist of a combined
literature review and analysis on the case of Saddam’s Iraq specifically, U.S.-occupied
Iraq, the effects of imposed polity on Iraq, and the problems that Iraq is dealing with
today. Iraq was left to bleed out after Saddam stabbed it, only to be saved by the United
States and the CPA, clinging to life on imposed institutions that did not serve the interests
of the people. As the dictator Saddam was overthrown and the Iraqi people ‘liberated’,
the power vacuum within the country ripped Iraq apart, with the post-invasion state
resembling something of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, in some ways worse than when

2. Saddam was president. The imposed democratic institutions were not doing their job, it
was dividing the Iraqi people instead of bringing them together and causing more
violence while putting pressure on already strained sectarian tensions.
Saddam’s Iraq. To better understand why imposed institutional choices failed to benefit
Iraqi society is not hard to fathom, the citizens were simply tired of being repressed.
Almost a quarter century rule of Saddam Hussein, the military general with no prior
military experience, the president who purged his personal bodyguards several times
throughout his career, and the man who was responsible for gassing tens of thousands of
Kurds during the al-Anfal Campaign. Saddam’s corruptness was evident early in his
presidential career when he created a new legislative body, the National Assembly, in
which “consisted entirely of longtime colleagues and relatives” (Angrist 2013: 286).
Other members of his family were given prominent positions in government and also in
state-owned sectors of the economy, corruption began to take hold in Iraq like never
before. The Baathi Republican Guard, the strong arm of the party, would rout opposition
and crush any political dissent or protest. The Baath Party, being based on socialist
principles, fervently supported women’s rights, however their actions did little to justify
their beliefs. Less than ten percent of women made up the labor force in 1977, however,
this would change as the Iran-Iraq War began to develop. The men would be fighting on
the frontlines, while the “women moved into a wide range of professional and technical
jobs during the course of the war”, only to be displaced after the war was over to give
returning soldiers chances at getting work (Angrist 2013: 305). However, the Baath
Party’s security forces replaced other military officers in the legislature. This replacement
became important for the Baath Party ideological campaign and party organizations
heavily dominated civil society: labor unions, university organizations, and even women
groups like the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW). Surveillance of the Iraqi
state and people was at an all time high as Saddam had had several assassination attempts
on his life since the Gulf War. Even before Saddam, the Baath Party faced severe
opposition from Shi’a groups like the Party of the Call to Islam, who formed by being
displaced from prospective Iraqi oil fields to Iran. While civil society was repressed in
Baathi Iraq, many people began to meet in their homes privately within their own circles
of affiliates to discuss politics due to the brutal repression of Saddam. As the Iran-Iraq
War fomented, Shi’a groups like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI) and Islamic Action Organization found themselves siding with Iran, while living
in Iraq fighting Saddam’s Republican Guard. The leaders of these groups found their
struggle difficult because “affiliation with an Islamic movement, even if informal, is not a
risk-free venture in cases where Islamic activities are either heavily monitored or outright
outlawed” as the situation in Saddam’s Iraq (Haklai 2009: 38). These Shi’a groups, along
with other Sunni tribal groups and the Kurds, make up the demographic of the Iraqi
population, each one being oppressed at one point in time during Saddam’s reign.
Many times in Iraqi history the Kurds found themselves on opposite sides of the
fence against the Baath Party. The Kurdish people’s region is made up of regions of Iraq,
Syria, Iran, and Turkey. Many other ethnic minorities such as Christian Assyrians, Iraqi
Turkmens, and Yazidis also live in this area, and also suffered casualties during the al-
Anfal Campaign. The hardest task the Kurds and these other minorities faced was that

3. Saddam had imposed strict rules on who could participate in office, and he allowed
Muslims and Christians to both hold governmental seats, but not the secular Kurds or
other tribal minorities who lived in the outlying regions of Iraq. The country was under
strict control of Saddam and the Baathis, and imposed discriminate institutions upon the
Iraqi people foreshadow the quandaries that faced the invading forces of 2003.
Shortly After the U.S.-led Invasion. The removal of Saddam’s regime and the military
prompted the CPA to establish a new governing regime, imposing institutions that would
allow them to coopt the Iraqi population. This meant cleaning house, and led to the
removal of all Baath Party officials and associates on all levels of administration while
simultaneously ridding the government of the technocrats of Iraq. The result of this
created bureaucratic fallout, and stripped the Iraqi government of all established
institutions, essentially leaving the country in a state of lawlessness. Was this done on
purpose? Did the CPA lack proper intelligence and staff to curb the problem? Was the
United States “seek[ing] to enhance their access to resources by pursuing the likelihood
of long-term access to goods stimulating the conquest” (Enterline, Grieg 2008: 883), or
was their main purpose to impose and protect democracy? States that have imposed by
polities by exogenous actors are usually easy to spot, and they normally have very
problematic issues with regard to their regime’s effectiveness and the socioeconomic
status of their people. It is rare to hear of a country like Sweden or Norway being
vulnerable enough to have an exogenous actor impose a regime on them, however the
same could be said about the U.A.E. or Oman. The question then becomes if any type of
imposed polity, whether democratic or not, benefits the citizenry, rather than imposed
democracy itself.
Domestically, Iraq proved difficult for the U.S. to control: too much territory and
not enough forces to monitor and supervise the population. In order to have successfully
imposed any sort of authority on Iraq, the invading force would have had to consist of
500,000 soldiers or more, they would have had to remain in the country for several years,
all while devoting significant time and resources to developing and restructuring Iraqi
society from the ground up. The lack of attention to detail by the CPA and their affiliates
only exacerbated the problem with the Iraq National Congress (INC) who was loosely
and unprofessionally organized along sectarian lines. The U.S. and the CPA “assumed
that Saddam’s state would remain intact even after he and his senior cronies had been
removed” and that Iraq would heal itself (Pollack 2013: 2). Sectarian militia groups who
were known for their violence against other ethnicities and heavily resisted the imposed
polity of the CPA, started forming out of disdain from occupation. As Saddam was
removed from power and other Sunni Baath Party members taken out of the
administration, the U.S. needed to replace them with other members of Iraqi society, so
they turned to the Shi’a and Kurds. The U.S. “went much too far, turning over the new
Iraq to the worst elements among the Shi’a and then standing by as they used their new
power against the Sunnis, just as Saddam had done to them in his time”, systematically
starting a sectarian civil war that severely weakened the legitimacy of the imposed
government of Iraq, and the little credibility that they had was now miniscule. These
militia leaders were essentially handed the Iraqi state, in which the won in elections prior
to the civil war. The U.S. and the Bush Administration made countless mistakes as far as

4. the diagnosis on the Iraqi state that led to the eventual sectarian civil war in 2006. Around
50,000 people died within the period of two years, raising concerns about the
effectiveness of the United States’ strategy to control Shi’a militia groups and
organizations that were scattered in and around Baghdad. The Sunni population of Iraq
became upset with American forces, since “Shi’a militias and death squads slaughtered
the Sunnis, drove them from Baghdad…often under the camouflage of the government’s
own security services” (Pollack 2013: 10).
Shortly thereafter the U.S. realized what they had supported, and began to cut
back on funding to Shi’a paramilitary groups and militias due to their sometimes
overreaching, violent tendencies towards their Sunni counterparts. Furthermore, “we
promised—and then made good on those promises—to force the Shi’a and Kurdish
leaders to give the Sunnis a place at Iraq’s table again” in order to foster compromise
among the competing factions of Iraqi society (Pollack 2013: 10).
Effects of Imposed Polity on the Iraqi State. The similarities between the British
invasion of Iraq and the United States occupation are uncanny to say the least. The
British Empire was the first to invoke the Iraqi divide through a League of Nations
mandate. The imposed institutions were “a set of international guarantees that would turn
three former provinces [of Iraq]…into a modern self-determining state” from the
remnants of the Ottoman Empire (Dodge 2006: 188). These three provinces consisted of
Basra to the south, Baghdad at the center, and Mosul in the north. Britain tried her best to
instill democratic tendencies into Iraqi society, but the Shi’a in Basra, Sunnis in Baghdad,
and the Kurds in Mosul did not accept the League of Nation’s mandate. This instability
was created by the imposed institutional choices that the British Empire intended to
implement. However, the failure of imposition resulted in Iraq gaining independence in
1932 and experiencing a series of authoritarian regimes until the U.S. invasion.
In 2003 the U.S. was not expecting to the Iraqi state to collapse in Baghdad so
suddenly. Iraq had suffered for a long time with “thirteen years of the harshest UN
sanctions ever imposed on a country and three wars in two decades had pushed the
structures of the Iraqi state to the brink of collapse” and brought civil society down with
it (Dodge 2006: 189). The U.S. occupation of Iraq would develop into much more than a
military invasion and removal of an authoritarian dictator, the long process of state
building would become a heavy burden to bear. In turn, dedicating a large number of
armed forces along with civil personnel to rebuild Iraq’s society became a monetary
burden for Americans to bear. Critics among the U.S. invasion began to question their
motives about whether or not they were concerned about the average Iraqi citizen’s well
being. Furthermore, imposing the CPA to govern Iraq with a heavy sectarian-divided
Iraqi National Congress irritated the prospects for democracy even more. Arab pundits on
the subject use the failure of imposed democracy to criticize the U.S. for their lack of
attention to detail, and that democracy is not what concerns the Americans, but rather
their own private interests and as long as the imposed state maintains the existing
condition. “Arab commentators cite as undermining U.S. credibility is the long-standing
U.S. support for the autocratic Arab regimes that are willing to accept U.S. policies in the
area, maintain the status quo, and supply the United States with abundant and cheap oil”,

5. and when a regime fails to serve their interests, they are simply eliminated or replaced
(Ottoway 2003: 10). There was immense outrage in 2003 when the U.S. led the invasion
of Iraq; some had wondered why it had taken them so long to finally do something about
Saddam, even after the two Gulf Wars, dozens of human rights violations and economic
failures.
Where is Iraq headed? The overall condition in Iraq has not improved since the dark
days of the civil war in 2006 and 2007. According to the Iraq Body Count Website
(https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/), there are civilians dying everyday, and the
numbers are up from previous years after 2007, so what does that say about Iraq’s current
status? It further strengthens the argument that sectarian divides in Iraqi society is blood
that is not able to clot, whether by exogenous actors imposing institutions or by the
several groups that make up their society, they are becoming more deeply divided. More
than ever, numbers of radical terrorist groups are controlling swathes of Iraqi territory:
the Islamic State ruling land in Iraq and neighboring Syria, the Badr Brigade and other
radical Shi’a groups to the south near the Iranian border. Also, groups like the Kurds in
the northern region of the country have already carved out a substantial sector of the state
that they manage and run governmentally—separate from Iraq.
Iraq’s internal makeup is something that should have been taken into more
consideration by both the British and the Americans. The institutions that both powers
imposed on Iraq resulted in failure, and the evacuation of them both. Each time, Iraq was
worse off than it was before, even though that was not an intended consequence by the
imposing power. While there are deep-seeded ethnic divisions in Iraq, “it is the degree of
ethnic heterogeneity coupled with the democratic political institutions that serves to
increase the probability of political challenges in contemporary Iraq” and chafes against
any progress towards compromise (Enterline, Grieg 2008: 906). These divisions showed
in Iraq’s elections in 2004 and 2005, when Sunnis refused to take part in them, and
allowed the Shi’a to dominate the presidential election outright, with the Kurds have the
prime minister position. On the part of the U.S., they were “ignoring the disastrous
experience of premature elections in other post-conflict societies” and not fully taking
into account the fragile facets of the Iraqi political environment (Pollack 2013: 5). The
Shi’a majority that would come to dominate Iraqi politics from 2005 to today would
come under the auspices of Nouri al-Maliki, a prominent Shi’a who was selected by the
United States. Once assuming office and consolidating his power among his cohorts,
Maliki achieved his famed status by crushing Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM), which was a Shi’a
militia group. This action is what allowed Maliki to take credit for ending the Iraq Civil
War, and drove the Iran sympathizers out of Basra. With the militias gone, and Iraq
seeming like it was on a path to some sort of success, the elections of 2010 would show
that Iraqi citizens could choose their leader based on integrity rather than fear tactics. For
the first time, the imposition of democracy seemed as though it was starting to work.
These remarkable elections “resulted in stunning victories for those parties
considered the most secular, the most vested in improving governance and services, the
least tied to the militias and the least sectarian” and allowed sensible politicians to hold
office (Pollack 2013: 13). The democratic fallout that is responsible for Iraq’s problems

6. today also occurred because of these elections. Maliki’s governing coalition was just shy
of having a majority against the Sunni Ayad Allawi, and Maliki denied of forming a new
government. Maliki then forced the Supreme Court of Iraq to allow him to preserve his
incumbency “rather than insist that Allawi be given the first chance, as is customary in
most democracies and was clearly what was best for Iraqi democracy, the United States
(and the United Nations) did nothing” to preserve the rule of law, when it was their
responsibility in the first place (Pollack 2013: 14).
This event retriggered the temporarily dormant sectarian divides amongst the Iraqi
people, and also led to a period of interregnum. Many citizens felt as though the newly
elected Obama Administration of the U.S. was not as committed to preserving Iraqi
democracy, or for their responsibility of imposing it. Furthermore, the removal of troops
shortly thereafter in 2011 allowed Maliki to further consolidate political clout, gaining
support from Iran while the Kurds were pacified. From this point Maliki purged the
Security Forces, severely endangering the fragile Iraqi democracy, overturning incentives
and merits that are salient democratic behaviors. The imposer of democracy in Iraq was
not checking their building of the state, and many of the important institutions that the
CPA and U.S. had setup were systematically undone. Imposing a polity on a state,
whether or not democratic in nature, will lead to that state’s eventual downfall. As seen in
the case of Iraq, states usually have polities imposed on them because of their vulnerable
nature to begin with, coupled with ethnic and sectarian divisions and lack of attention to
detail by the state builder severely irritates democratic prospects. Furthermore, a few
years of quasi-democratic institutions will not be enough to undo over seven decades of
authoritarian rule, especially when being invaded by an exogenous actor, and then
undergoing a harsh civil war, only to get dragged into another five years later. If
imposing a regime on a state is to be in any way effective, strategies to foster
compromise among competing ethnic and sectarian groups must become a priority. Better
intelligence and organization has to be taken into account, and historical nuances must be
studied. Imposed democracy has failed in Iraq, just as it did in Vietnam and several other
countries—violence and occupation will negate and even contradict democratic
tendencies. Iraq’s future does not look bright as the country faces the Islamic State and
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the sectarian divides in the country have only deepened, and the
imposition of democracy has contributed to it.

7. Works Cited
Angrist, Michele Penner. 2013. Politics & Society in the Contemporary Middle East, 2nd
ed. London: Lynne Reiner Publishers.
Dodge, Toby. 2006. “Iraq: The Contradictions of Exogenous State-Building in Historical
Perspective.” Third World Quarterly, Vol.27, No.1, From Nation-Building to
State-Building.
Enterline, Andrew J. and J. Michael Grieg. 2005. “Beacons of Hope? The Impact of
Imposed Democracy on Regional Peace, Democracy, and Prosperity.” The
Journal of Politics Vol. 67, No. 4: 1075-1098.
Enterline, Andrew J. and J. Michael Grieg. 2008. “Perfect Storm? Political Instability in
Imposed Polities and the Futures of Iraq and Afghanistan.” The Journal of
Conflict Resolution, Vol. 52, No. 6: 880-915.
Haklai, Oded. 2009. “Authoritarianism and Islamic Movements in the Middle East:
Research and Theory-building in the Twenty-first Century.” International Studies
Review 11: 27-45.
Hanusch, Marek. 2013. “Islam and democracy: a response.” Public Choice 154: 315-321.
Ottaway, Marina. 2005. “The Problem of U.S. Credibility.” Uncharted Journey:
Promoting Democracy in the Middle East 173-189.
Ottaway, Marina and Thomas Carothers. 2004. “Middle East Democracy.” Foreign
Policy No. 145: 22-24+26-28.
Pollack, Kenneth M. 2013. “The Fall and Rise and Fall of Iraq.” Saban Center at
Brookings Institute, Middle East Memo, No. 29: 1-21.

8. Weidmann, Nils B. and Idean Salehyan. 2013. “Violence and Ethnic Segregation: A
Computational Model Applied to Baghdad.” Internaitonal Studies Quarterly
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