Operationalizing Iraqi freedom

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.