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The misleading idea that Saddam's regime could be replaced by an alternative elite of US-backed exiles bears heavy responsibility for the country's instability.
On 27 November 2008, the Iraqi parliament voted to accept a new set of treaties that if implemented in full would mark the effective end of the American occupation. They set an unambiguous timetable for all US troops to be out of the country by December 2011. Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count estimates that 9000 Iraqi civilians were killed during 2008, compared with 24,295 in 2007 and 27,599 in 2006. As a date is set for the end of the occupation and violence drops to levels not seen since the two years following the invasion, the scale of United States ambitions in Iraq is fully apparent.
US war aims involved nothing less than the complete socio-political re-engineering of the country. The removal of Saddam Hussein's regime was the first and most straightforward part of that plan. The US then had to replace the old ruling elite with one that was much less economically and politically autonomous, one which could not resort to diplomatic defiance or military adventurism. The creation of this radically new political order would ultimately mean building an Iraqi government that was in broad agreement with US foreign policy goals. This would certainly involve minimising the role of former members of the old regime, but also the identification and marginalisation of other political forces that might destabilise a pro-US agenda. Finally, in recognition of the ideological justification for regime change, the new governing elite needed a degree of electoral legitimacy. This would mean, at some stage, not only giving the government back to Iraqis who were deemed suitable to Washington, but back to a governing elite that was either electable or who could, at least, mobilise a significant section of Iraqi popular opinion.
The US government sought to achieve this highly ambitious agenda by giving the post-Ba'athist state to its friends, a group of long-exiled politicians who throughout the 1990s had become close to Washington. The extent to which power has been transferred to a set of familiar allies is indicated by the work of Phebe Marr. Marr's research in Baghdad suggests that only 26.8 per cent of the new...