Initiated in response to the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan formed part of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror but they were also a strategic response to the United States' long hegemonic decline. In its chaotic withdrawal some 20 years later, the US had accelerated the disorganization and chaos in the very societies it sought to pacify and rebuild.


Whereas much has been written about the military campaigns, this book focuses on the occupations of Iraq (2003–11) and Afghanistan (2001–21) as part of the processes of global political economy. Private contracts for reconstruction projects were lucrative, unregulated and unsupervised and largely led to the further degradation of infrastructure and immiseration of the occupied territories. Corruption and neoliberal accumulation thrived. Neoliberalism is shown to have been a core driver of the rationalization of America's wars of intervention, which presented an economic opportunity too good to miss.