Despite the soaring rhetoric of state-building during the presidency of George W. Bush, state-wrecking is a better description of what the Administration actually did. State-wrecking followed different trajectories in different countries. The only common thread among them over the past eight years was their sheer inadvertence. Under the Taliban in the late 1990s, Afghanistan had something resembling a state for the first time since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since the ouster of the Taliban, the emergence of an effective Afghan state has proved frustratingly elusive. In Somalia, after 15 years of failed statehood, there were signs in 2006 that the Islamic Courts Union might establish control over significant parts of the country. But this was thwarted by a U.S.-backed Ethiopian intervention force. Although there arguably were good political reasons for military intervention in both cases, the rhetoric of state-building is nonetheless belied by the unwitting reality of state-wrecking.

But the most daunting case of Bush Administration state-wrecking is Iraq. The country used to be an autocratic state, and a nasty one at that. Now, however, despite the hopefulness engendered by a reasonably successful election this past January, it is a state most likely headed toward systemic failure.

There are several reasons for pessimism about Iraq’s future. The Iraqi state encompasses a deeply divided society that has historically been held together only by a combination of ruthless leadership and, during its Hashemite era, a trans-sectarian religious authority. But then the U.S.-led military intervention decapitated the Ba‘ath regime, and an overambitious but understaffed occupation regime that strove officially to transform Iraq into a functioning democracy has instead created a power vacuum that is still unfilled. A key reason for this vacuum is that the effort to restore the Weberian public monopoly over the legitimate use of force has been obstructed by various forms of security privatization....