Revolutionary Possibility and the Bounds of Imperial Subterfuge in Iraq

The discourses that emerged from the politically and socially fluid conditions of the uncertain period after Iraq’s 1958 revolution show that the revolution germinated senses of possibility in the present among Iraqis, producing a surge of emotively hopeful expression. But these discourses developed amid the rapid realignment of Iraqi politics around polarized factions that attacked and counterattacked each other in the streets of Iraq’s urban areas. Furthermore, the perennial fear of foreign subterfuge was heightened immediately after 1958 by the sense that the revolutionary condition put Iraqis in particularly acute danger. It is difficult to separate the perception of imperial intervention from the known ways that it happened, both for those subjected to it and for the historian trying to reconstruct it. That illegibility can make imperial power formidable, but it is also a form of disorder stemming from a lack of total control—that is, a reflection of imperialism’s own bounds. Iraq’s revolutionary moments are therefore critical to a broader analysis of the push-and-pull relationship of insurgent hope and imperial subterfuge.