Before the US-led coalition’s occupation of Iraq starting in March 2003, there was at least one subject upon which certain advocates and opponents of the war agreed: that the invasion was imperialistic. Both sides weaponised the historical role western imperialism played in the Middle East in an equally pragmatic and impressionistic fashion. But they did so through opposite interpretations of the past.
Fouad Ajami, a prominent historian of the Middle East who died in 2014, reportedly advised the George W. Bush administration in favour of intervention. Ajami argued that the British empire’s moment in Iraq had come after the first world war. But it was economically exhausted, and therefore failed. It was now the US’s time. Its driving motivation, he said – the “imperial burden” – should be “modernising the Arab world”, above and beyond toppling Saddam Hussein.
