ABSTRACT
Bush administration ocials managing the 2003 US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq hoped to comprehensively remake the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual face of the country. Consistent with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s “creative chaos” doctrine,3 American ocials rst fostered the instant privatization of state assets by allowing mass looting, then enacted a series of reforms intended to reorient Iraq’s education system. Concentrating on such interventions as textbook reform, facility restoration, de-Ba‘thication, and bilateral university assistance, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ocials had hoped to shepherd a new and more amenable Iraq out of the shell of the old. One of the more ambitious announced interventions of U.S. government ocials in Iraq’s education system involved reforming all levels of curriculum to better coincide with “international standards,” – particularly through textbook revision. As it turns out, following the completion of the UNICEF/UNESCO textbook editing projects, Project RISE, and a series of higher education projects, the CPA educational legacy turned out to be remarkably modest.
