The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was waged by the so-called Coalition of the Willing. How to conceptualise the connections between capitalist dynamics and interstate war has bedevilled historical materialist geopolitics for some time. There is an agreement that interstate war cannot simply be read off from the economic necessities of capitalist accumulation. Access to diesel may have played a part in the U.S. push for the attack on Iraq, but it would be too simple to argue that this was the single cause driving the decision. As Alejandro Colás and Gonzalo Pozo (2011: 219) have recognised in their attempt to develop a Marxist geopolitics, ‘the centrality of space will depend on the degree to which it is marked by the particular social infrastructure, class constitution, and commodification of territory in different geographies and historical contexts.’ But as critics have suggested, precisely where one would expect detailed analysis of such contexts, how the analysis avoids a mechanistic geo-economic position and what the specific focus on political agency is are all lingering problems in the examination of capitalist geopolitics (Agnew, 2011; Black, 2011; Guzzini, 2011). To focus on a ‘gearbox of imperial control’ that enables the structures of contemporary imperialism, through different modes of foreign relations, to manage postcolonial states is equally problematic (van der Pijl, 2011). Economic determinist analyses of this type cannot illuminate the complex dynamics of class struggle underlying contemporary geopolitics, such as the invasion of Iraq.

Following the framework set out at the beginning of this book, the purpose of this chapter is to deliver a historical materialist perspective on the internal relationship of the state and geopolitics through an analysis of U.S. imperium in relation to the Iraq War. To recap, the argument in Chapter 1 detailed the philosophy of internal relations that distinctively marks historical materialism as a theory of history. Summarily put, the dialectical emphasis of historical materialism stresses the priority of the internal relationship of content and form where generative processes of capital formation are prioritised rather than different moments (events, things or entities) (Harvey, 1996: 74–5).