4 - The USA in Iraq

Summary

Detailing the US intervention in Iraq, this chapter provides a list of policy requests from the USA to Iraqi partners and the rate of Iraqi compliance with US requests from 2004 to 2010. Providing a summary of the US-Iraqi counterinsurgency partnership (2003–11), this chapter discusses several distinctive components of the Iraqi-US alliance, namely the imperfect and awkward transition to Iraqi sovereignty and Washington negotiating with not one, but two local governments in Iraq, namely the Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad, and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil. Iraqi compliance was affected by the convergence or divergence of US and Iraqi interests, interacting with US dependency on Iraq to implement particular reforms. There are 106 US policy requests identified and detailed including working against sectarianism and corruption.