Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied - Softcover

'A superb recent book on the mandate.' --Time

'As postwar Iraq struggles forward, Toby Dodge's book has many lessons. Inventing Iraq is primarily a cold-eye analysis of Britain's failures as an occupying power after the first world war. ...Dodge's book is a powerful warning to look at countries in their own cultural and historical context.' --Jonathan Steele, The Guardian

'A very good piece of work in every respect: extensive research, familiarity and mastery of the secondary literature, well organised and lucid, conceptually sophisticated, with theoretical themes woven into the fabric of the substantive analysis.' --Sami Zubeida, Birkbeck College, University of London

Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire - the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image - renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of Coalition forces in Iraq since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Dodge shows that the state created by the British held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain took upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East.