Introduction

On 1 May 2003, then-US President George W. Bush announced the end of the 2003 Iraq War during a speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. In his address, Bush said that from now on ‘our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing’ Iraq. During its ‘transition from dictatorship to democracy’, Bush further said, the US-led Coalition would ‘stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people’.

In the so-called mission accomplished address cited above, Bush justified the occupation of Iraq with implicit reference to one of the tenets of liberal peacebuilding, which tends to be implemented in the form of statebuilding and aims to build a democratic state around liberal institutions. Scholars argue that the statebuilding process enacted by the US coalition shortly after Bush had delivered his speech was, in fact, conducted in accord with the liberal peacebuilding paradigm. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that this process abysmally failed. It is, however, less researched how the US coalition statebuilding project can be understood with respect to legitimacy concerns. In this particular context, it is noteworthy that Bush’s statement cited above further highlighted Iraqi agency: according to Bush, the US coalition would support Iraqis as they attempted to build a state for the Iraqi people. Bush's statement can thus be regarded as an attempt to obtain legitimacy for the US coalition led statebuilding project. Bush emphasised Iraqi agency in order to legitimise foreign occupation vis-à-vis the Iraqi people as well as the wider international community. It turned out, however, that Iraqi agency was undermined during the statebuilding process. Firstly, US coalition statebuilding was primarily designed to serve US-business rather than Iraqi interest. Secondly, statebuilding lacked legitimacy and this can be regarded as a root cause for its failures. However, these connections have not yet been considered by scholarship. Consequently, this essay will further assess how issues of legitimacy related to military intervention and statebuilding in Iraq. More specifically, the essay addresses the following questions: did the US coalition exercise legitimate authority for the 2003 invasion-occupation of Iraq? How did legitimacy relate to international norms, local practices and local perceptions? What kinds of institutions were established during statebuilding in Iraq? And, finally, to what extend were these institutions legitimate?