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Provincializing America: Race, Neoliberalism, and Sovereignty in the War on Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2022

Yousef K. Baker
Yousef K. Baker*
Affiliation:
Department of International Studies, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
*
Email: Yousef.baker@csulb.edu
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Extract

I came of age in the early years of the “War on Terror.” As a young student activist, my initial arguments against the wars in 2001 and 2003 followed a common logic, responding to disinformation, ahistorical narratives, and false claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Muslims. Like many who work in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, this work was driven by the belief that exposing the narratives of the target nations to be wrong would in turn expose the false premises behind the wars. I have by now spent my entire adult life researching, writing, and teaching about the “War on Terror” with a specific focus on the war on Iraq. My hope was that “humanizing” and providing more insight into the views of the people “over there” would alter popular ideas in the United States and steer American state actions in a different direction than intervention.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 376 - 381
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Baker, Yousef K., “Global Capitalism and Iraq: The Making of a Neoliberal State,” International Review of Modern Sociology 40, no. 2 (2014): 121–48Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Michael R. Gordon, “In U.S. Exit from Iraq, Failed Efforts and Challenges,” New York Times, 22 September 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/world/middleeast/failed-efforts-of-americas-last-months-in-iraq.html; Ali Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki—and Lost Iraq,” Washington Post, 3 July 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-stuck-with-maliki--and-lost-iraq/2014/07/03/0dd6a8a4-f7ec-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html; or Sarah Childress, “Ryan Crocker: ‘Our National Security . . . Is at Stake Right Now,’” PBS Frontline, 29 July 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/ryan-crocker-our-national-security-is-at-stake-right-now.

3 I rely here on Mills, Charles, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Anghie, Antony, “Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Mandate System of the League of Nations,” NYU Journal of International Law and Politics 34, no. 3 (2002): 513–634Google Scholar.

4 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tim Baker, “Preferred Shares: Inflation, Wages, and the Fifty-Year Crisis,” Phenomenal World, 24 June 2021, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/preferred-shares.

5 Barry Z. Cynamon and Steven M. Fazzari, “Household Debt in the Consumer Age: Source of Growth; Risk of Collapse,” Capitalism and Society 3, no. 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.2202/1932-0213.1037; Aldo Barba and Massimo Pivetti, “Rising Household Debt: Its Causes and Macroeconomic Implications; A Long Period Analysis,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 33, no. 1 (2009): 113–37.

6 John G. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982); Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 36; Harvey, Neoliberalism, 9–19.

7 Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 7–12.

8 Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 698–703.

9 See for example Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Commentary, February 1963, https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/my-negro-problem-and-ours.

10 Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 38–70.

11 Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “America First: Paleoconservatism and the Ideological Struggle for the American Right,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25, no. 1 (2020): 32.

12 Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48659.

13 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis.

14 I use “Muslim” in contrast to Muslim to emphasize that the “Muslim” of the “War on Terror” is a racial category as opposed to the Muslims who are the adherents of Islam.

15 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the “public and psychological wages” that white workers would receive in lieu of their otherwise low pay through such things as public deference, titles, positions, access to public spaces, voting with ease, and other things that non-whites were barred from; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1935), 700–1.

16 George W. Bush, “State of the Union,” 28 January 2003, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html.

17 Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

18 I am using the formulation of “disavowal” as a key logic of neoliberalism based on Arash Davari, “Indeterminate Governmentality: Neoliberal Politics in Revolutionary Iran, 1968–1979,” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016); and Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–19. The arguments of this section emerged out of several conversation with Arash Davari to whom I am very grateful.

19 I borrow this and the title of this section from Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

20 Perhaps the most prophetic part of Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961)Google Scholar.