ABSTRACT
From the perspective of the cultural critic of the fi eld of development studies, it was somewhat inevitable that the George W. Bush administration would turn to an emancipatory narrative of “national development” to justify its actions in Iraq once the stated grounds for invasion vanished. Iraqi stores of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were nowhere to be found, while intelligence reports on Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein proved to be doctored. The Bush administration lost no time in taking up a familiar Cold War stance-that of deposing tyrannical authority, on one hand, and of installing democratically elected governments, on the otheras the imprimaturs for a war of occupation. For Latin American scholars, this stance was regrettably familiar. Since the United States gained colonial possession of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam following the 1898 Spanish-American war, it assigned itself the tutelary mission of nation building in the Americas, which required repeated military intervention and the overthrow of (often democratically elected) governments deemed unsuitable. With the onset of the Cold War, this “nation building” took on the particular discursive form of development, juxtaposing the “freedom” of capitalist economic development with the “tyranny” of socialist forms of ownership. Indeed, Bush was relying on the power of this Cold War discourse of development when he sounded the trumpet for democracy and economic growth in Iraq, counting on a public so familiar with the cultural meaning of this discourse as to be transfi xed by it. He wanted a simple equation to materialize in the patriot’s mind: today’s terrorist is yesterday’s communist. This stance proved successful, at least until the situation in Iraq dissolved into an ethnic civil war that could not possibly be mapped onto the vectors of a Marxist war of national liberation. The war of occupation, Bush repeatedly told us in 2003 through 2006, would produce a Cold War dream: Iraq’s national sovereignty and world peace at once.
