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Review

Rashid Khalidi did not wait for the Iraq war to go bad before writing this book. He began it before the March 2003 invasion, finished it as the insurgency gathered force, and sent it to press knowing that the catastrophe he predicted would be dismissed as polemical overreach by the very policy intellectuals whose historical ignorance he was documenting. Nearly two decades later, Resurrecting Empire reads less like an artifact of its moment than like a structural analysis whose explanatory power has outlasted the particular administration it indicts. Khalidi's central wager is that the American occupation of Iraq cannot be understood without grasping the century-long history of Western imperial penetration of the Middle East — and that the Bush administration's failure to grasp that history was not an accident but a feature of imperial thinking itself. The book is emphatically a brief against the war, but it earns its polemical force through the patient accumulation of documented historical parallels, each one tightening the analogy between British and French colonialism circa 1920 and American hegemony circa 2003 until the resemblance becomes impossible to ignore.

The comparison is not decorative. Khalidi structures the book as an extended exercise in what might be called applied historical memory: every chapter takes a theme of the current occupation — democratization rhetoric, oil strategy, the Palestinian question — and excavates its colonial precedents until the present moment appears less as a new departure than as a repetition the perpetrators do not recognize. The epigraphs alone constitute an argument. The book opens with T. E. Lawrence writing in 1920 that "the people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour" and that "things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows." By the time the reader reaches the second chapter, three epigraphs are stacked in sequence: Napoleon's 1798 proclamation to the Egyptians ("I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights"), General Maude's 1917 proclamation upon entering Baghdad ("Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators"), and Donald Rumsfeld's April 2003 statement in the same city ("you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate"). The three statements are separated by two centuries but are textually indistinguishable, and Khalidi's point is precisely that they are indistinguishable because the genre — the imperial proclamation of benign intent — predates and outlives any particular occupier. The people being "liberated" have heard it before, and they know what follows.

This is the book's deepest methodological commitment: that the peoples of the Middle East possess historical memory, transmitted through educational systems and national narratives, that renders them impervious to liberator rhetoric in ways American planners systematically underestimate. Khalidi argues that the colonial record is not some dusty archive known only to specialists but a living political force, taught in schools and commemorated in holidays throughout the region. The 1920 Iraqi revolt against British rule, which the RAF suppressed with the aerial bombardment of civilian villages — Khalidi quotes the RAF's own operational notes describing how "within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed" — is not forgotten in Iraq. The proposition that Iraqis in 2003 would greet American troops as liberators was, from this perspective, a delusion so profound it qualifies as a category error: mistaking a population with a century of anticolonial memory for a blank slate awaiting liberation.

The book's first chapter establishes the baseline. Khalidi traces Western penetration of the Middle East from Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt through the extension of British and French control over virtually the entire region by the early twentieth century. He documents the forms of rule — direct in Algeria, indirect through installed monarchs and "advisors" in Egypt and Iraq, the League of Nations mandates that cloaked colonial control in legal legitimacy — and the resistance each provoked. But the chapter also traces a parallel history that complicates the story considerably: the genuine indigenous experiments in constitutional government that Western powers repeatedly undermined. Iran's 1906 constitutional revolution, the 1908 restoration of the Ottoman constitution, Egypt's parliamentary period from 1922 to 1952 — each represented an authentic movement toward representative governance, and each was crippled by foreign intervention. Britain kept the popular Wafd party out of power for eighteen of those thirty Egyptian years. The 1953 CIA-and-MI6-backed coup that toppled the elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq — after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — remains the single most consequential American intervention in the region's political development, and Khalidi treats it as the template for the structural contradiction that defines the American position: Washington says it wants democracy, but genuine democracy in the Middle East would produce governments that oppose American policy on Palestine, on bases, and on oil.

Chapter Two develops this contradiction into a full-scale indictment of the Bush administration's democratization rhetoric. Khalidi's argument is not merely that the rhetoric was hypocritical — though he documents with relish the administration's long record of supporting Middle Eastern autocrats, including Saddam Hussein himself during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, when Rumsfeld famously shook Saddam's hand in Baghdad — but that external military intervention is structurally incapable of producing democracy. The mechanism he identifies is counterintuitive: occupation does not simply fail to implant democratic institutions; it actively retards them by strengthening the very forces — chauvinistic nationalism, security-state spending, authoritarian defensive responses — that democracy requires weakening. The historical record he marshals is formidable: no foreign military occupation in the modern Middle East has produced a durable democracy. The Germany and Japan analogies beloved of war advocates fail, Khalidi argues, because those were already-formed nations with powerful state structures and coherent national identities that American forces merely democratized rather than built from scratch. Iraq and Afghanistan required the bottom-up construction of state capacity under conditions of occupation, distrust, and armed resistance — an entirely different and far more difficult enterprise. The chapter's most damning section traces the intellectual genealogy of the war to the neoconservative network around Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, whose 1996 report "A Clean Break" for incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu advocated removing Saddam Hussein as an Israeli strategic objective and said nothing whatsoever about democracy for Iraqis. Khalidi quotes an Iraqi physician treating civilian casualties in Baghdad: "Why all this blood? They came to free us? This is freedom?" The question hangs over the entire chapter unanswered because it is, on the administration's own terms, unanswerable.

The third chapter, on oil, is the book's analytical core. Khalidi traces the oil story from Churchill's pre-World War I decision to convert the Royal Navy from coal to oil — a decision that made the Persian Gulf a permanent British strategic interest — through the D'Arcy concession of 1901 that gave a British subject rights to Iranian oil for a mere sixteen percent of profits, the British government's 1913 purchase of a controlling stake in Anglo-Persian, the 1953 coup that restored Western control after Mosaddeq's nationalization, and the long American embrace of Saudi Arabia after Standard Oil of California secured the kingdom's concession in 1933. The epigraph, from U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in 1944, sets the tone: "the buying power of the United States will depend in some degree on the retention by the United States of such oil resources. Indeed the actual expansion of such holdings is very much to be desired." Khalidi's treatment of oil is nuanced enough to acknowledge that indigenous control of oil revenues — achieved through the OPEC revolution of the 1970s — proved a "cruel disappointment" for ordinary people, since the wealth flowed not to populations but to unrepresentative ruling elites who converted it into patronage, repression, and weapons that "rusted in the desert." The rentier-state analysis that emerges — resource revenues strengthening the state against its own society, creating a "culture of dependency" that froze ruling families in place for decades — is one of the book's most original contributions, and it complicates any simple narrative that recovering control of oil from Western companies was an unalloyed triumph. The oil-producing states became, in Khalidi's sharp phrase, "kleptocracies" where the ruling family "in effect owned the state and its resources."

Chapter Four, on Palestine, draws on Khalidi's own experience as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid and Washington negotiations. This is the most personally invested section of the book, and also the one where Khalidi's argument about American policy is most scalding. He traces the arc from Woodrow Wilson's support for the Balfour Declaration through Truman's recognition of Israel — quoting Truman's remarkably candid explanation to advisors who opposed partition: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents" — to the 1991 Madrid conference and the fatally flawed Oslo process. The central charge is that the United States progressively abandoned any pretense of even-handedness. Washington pledged in its Letter of Assurance to the Palestinians that it would oppose "prejudicial or precedential" actions, but the Israeli settler population in the occupied territories doubled from 200,000 to 400,000 during the Oslo years, and a network of settler-only bypass roads fragmented the West Bank into isolated parcels. Khalidi argues that the Camp David "generous offer" narrative — the claim that then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made an unprecedented offer that Yasir Arafat rejected — is a myth, and he points to the subsequent Taba negotiations in January 2001, where the sides came considerably closer, as evidence that the window for agreement was closed prematurely and tendentiously. The chapter's most devastating section concerns the second intifada: Khalidi documents that the uprising began as unarmed protest met with sniper fire, that 141 Palestinians had been killed before the first Israeli civilian death on November 2, 2000, and that the American media systematically inverted the casualty chronology to present Palestinian violence as the initiator. The chapter's paired epigraphs — Balfour in 1919 declaring that Zionist claims outweighed "the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," and Israeli Army Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon in 2002 insisting that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people" — frame the continuity Khalidi wants the reader to feel: the Palestinian experience of the twentieth century was one of being told, repeatedly and by different powers, that their presence on the land did not count.

The final chapter makes the comparison between British and American imperial projects explicit. Khalidi analyzes the willful ignorance of Middle East experts within the Bush administration — the Office of Special Plans under Douglas Feith, the sidelining of State Department Arabists, the ascendancy of pundits who, in Khalidi's acid aside about a prominent neoconservative, "couldn't find their way from the airport to the Hilton" — and traces the consequences of that ignorance in the mismanaged occupation. The chapter also contains the book's one concrete alternative: Khalidi proposes replacing the unilateral American occupation with a new, time-limited UN-backed international mandate for Iraq, arguing that the international community that created Iraq through the postwar mandate system bears a residual responsibility to rebuild it. He does not present this as a panacea — the chapter is suffused with pessimism about whether any externally managed political process can succeed in conditions of occupation and insurgency — but as the "least damaging" course available, and one that might at least distribute the costs and legitimacy deficits more broadly than an American occupation increasingly seen in the region as a neo-crusader project.

Khalidi writes within a decolonial intellectual tradition whose central text is Edward Said's Orientalism, and the Said epigraph that opens Chapter Five — "What America refuses to see clearly, it can hardly hope to remedy" — functions as the book's methodological north star. The argument everywhere is that Western representations of the Middle East have served as the handmaiden of power, that the "historical vacuum" in which American public debate operates is not a passive absence but an actively maintained ignorance, and that the work of scholarship is to fill that vacuum with documented reality. The book engages seriously with the historians Khalidi considers neoimperialist apologists — Elie Kedourie, Bernard Lewis, and their intellectual descendants — and with the contemporary revival of imperial thinking exemplified by Niall Ferguson, whom Khalidi accuses of "shallow, simplistic, naive, and ahistorical arrogance" in urging the United States to embrace an imperial role. Khalidi's contempt for the pundit class that facilitated the war is undisguised: he describes the "pliant punditocracy" and the "pathetic servility" of a media that parroted administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Saddam–9/11 link that polls showed a majority of Americans believed — a belief the administration "did nothing to discourage." The countervailing power of independent journalism receives its due in the figure of Seymour Hersh, whose reporting on Abu Ghraib detonated a scandal that the administration's information management could not contain.

The book's weaknesses are inseparable from its strengths. Khalidi's historical comparative method, for all its power, occasionally flattens distinctions between different kinds of imperial project. The British in Iraq in the 1920s and the Americans in Iraq in 2003 are undeniably comparable, but they are not identical, and Khalidi's rhetorical structure — driven by the need to establish parallels — sometimes underplays the differences in scale, ideology, and international context. The neoconservative vision of democratic transformation by force, however cynically deployed, was not simply a replay of British indirect rule through installed monarchs; it was something genuinely new in imperial history, a Wilsonian-militarist hybrid that Khalidi's framework can describe but not fully theorize. The book's treatment of oil, while analytically rich, stops short of reckoning with the climate implications of the petroleum economy it documents so thoroughly — an absence that looks larger in retrospect than it did in 2004. And the proposed UN mandate solution, while presented as a pragmatic least-bad option rather than a solution, rests on assumptions about international cooperation and UN capacity that the subsequent two decades have not vindicated. Iraq did receive a measure of international involvement after 2004, and the results were not appreciably better than unilateral occupation.

But these limitations do not touch the book's central achievement, which is to demonstrate that the American invasion of Iraq was not an isolated policy mistake but an episode in a structural pattern that extends back two centuries. Khalidi's contention that foreign military domination and indigenous resistance form an "irresoluble contradiction" that no amount of force or good intentions can overcome is not a prediction that depends on particular tactical decisions or the competence of particular administrators. It is a historical law of the kind that the people who launch wars of choice are professionally incapable of entertaining. The book's warnings about the costs of imperial ignorance — in lives, in treasure, in reputation, in regional stability — have been borne out so comprehensively that Resurrecting Empire now functions less as a polemic than as a work of contemporary history whose author had the misfortune to be right too early. Readers encountering it today will find it speaks to a larger pattern of American military intervention in the broader Middle East whose consequences are still unfolding. The book belongs on the same shelf as the anti-imperialist historiography it extends, but it does something that tradition rarely achieves: it intervenes in a live political debate with scholarship dense enough to outlast the debate it entered.