ABSTRACT
Over the course of the unipolar decade and a half since the end of the Cold War, the term ‘empire’ returned to vogue amongst mainstream commentators.4 It was only with the fall of Saddam Hussein and the introduction of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administration in Iraq led by US Ambassador Paul Bremer, however, that the cognate term ‘colonialism’ resurfaced in mainstream discourse.5 To be sure, colonialism had never gone away in some places, with those territories that chose to remain part of the administering power and the continued denial of Palestinian and Sahrawi self-determination,6 but Iraq perhaps marked the first time in the unipolar era that something new was criticized in mainstream commentary via direct colonial comparisons: the imperial hyperpower had shifted into an activity with echoes of post-Renaissance European colonialism, not only toppling a local government, but also administering the territory and attempting to profoundly reorient its economic, political and cultural system. In this narrative, as a ‘new’ form of colonialism Iraq was aberrant, a sole exception to the view, as reflected in the 1993 quote from Edward Said provided earlier, that as options on the palette of national and international policy, colonies and protectorates are the stuff of history.7
