Axis of Evil or Access to Diesel?

This article examines how the Iraq War was a space in the ongoing geographical extension of global capitalism linked to us foreign policy. Was it simply the decision by a unitary, hegemonic actor in the inter-state system overriding concerns from other states? Was it an imperialist move to secure the ‘global oil spigot’? Alternatively, did the use of military force reflect the interests and emergence of a transnational state apparatus? We argue that the us imperium needs to be conceptualised as a specific form of state, within which and through which fractions of national and transnational capital operate. In so doing, the Iraq War is assessed as a moment in the extension of global capitalism in which the interests of a national fraction of capital within the us state form was dominant, thereby placing processes of class struggle and their relation to wider spaces of imperialism at the centre of analysis.