Operationalizing Iraqi freedom: Governmentality, neo‐liberalism and new public management in the war in Iraq

Abstract

Purpose

To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance.

Design/methodology/approach

Using an analytics of governmentality, this paper interrogates US government discourse on the war in Iraq, focusing on a series of Department of Defense documents entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (MSSI).

Findings

Through the use of New Public Management techniques, the MSSI reports render the war in Iraq in depoliticized, decontextualized, apolitical and amoral terms. Such a rendering does an unacceptable violence to the experiences of those living in the war zone and to the complex context of US military involvement in Iraq.

Originality/value

Neo‐liberal regimes of knowledge and practice are ubiquitous, perhaps even hegemonic. This analysis disturbs the neat logic of neo‐liberalism and seeks to reinsert the troubling bodies, both political and material, which such a logic obviates. In so doing, it problematizes both the deployment of neo‐liberal regimes of knowledge production and critics’ easy dismissal of the War on Terror as an evanescent discursive construction.

Citation

Wool, Z.H. (2007), "Operationalizing Iraqi freedom: Governmentality, neo‐liberalism and new public management in the war in Iraq", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 27 No. 11/12, pp. 460-468. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443330710835819