Includes bibliographical references (pages [171]-205) and index.
Introduction: the theory and practice of predicting political change -- Paradigmatic views of political change in the Middle East: Arab exceptionalism and the international order -- Paradigms of change and American foreign policy toward Iraq in the 1980s: moderating a totalitarian regime and the road to the Gulf War -- Containing a rogue state: the Iraq policy of the Clinton administration -- September Eleven, the Bush administration and the ascendance of the neoconservative vision of democratic universalism -- The buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom: implementing democratic universalism -- Operation Iraqi Freedom: the rise and fall of democratic universalism -- Reflections on the Iraqi predictive predicament