With the Bush administration's policy shift, in the aftermath of 9/11, from the use of sanctions to the use of overt violence for regime change, Iraq is once again occupying a path-breaking role. In Iraq today the US is presiding over a country about which it has a limited understanding and is attempting to rebuild state institutions and reform their interaction with society. The US faces the problem of how to deal with a country whose civil society was largely wiped out during the Baathist dictatorship.Military interventions into failed or rogue states with the overt aim of reforming their political systems, although increasingly common in the post-Cold War era, have to date been largely unsuccessful. The most important questions at the heart of such interventions - can states be rebuilt and if so how? - remain largely unanswered. If the rebuilding and reform of the Iraqi state is to be successful then the US will have to find those answers in and beyond Baghdad.