Regime Unchanged: Why the War on Iraq Changed Nothing

Milan Rai's previous book became an international bestseller in the run-up to war. Regime Unchanged picks up where War Plan Iraq left off: it is a shocking, brilliantly persuasive account of the conflict and its aftermath that is essential reading for anyone who cares about peace and democracy.

Regime Unchanged shows how the US government has involved itself in a political quagmire in Iraq that threatens to evolve into a long and bloody conflict. As the number of US casualties rise every day, and fighting continues, the idea that the war is won has begun to fade. The longer the chaos continues, the more the conflict threatens to engulf other regions already bitterly opposed to American intervention.

Rigorously dissecting official propaganda and media misrepresentation, Regime Unchanged documents the real aftermath of the war. Milan Rai presents damning evidence that Ba‘athists were deliberately restored to power. In the confusion of the first month of Iraq's ‘liberation’, the US and Britain pursued a path very similar to that taken in liberated territories after WWII: demobilization of resistance movements, and the restoration of collaborators and fascists. Regime Unchanged demonstrates that this was not a war for disarmament, or for ‘regime change’, but a war for power.

Milan Rai examines how Washington undermined and finally shut down the UN weapons inspectors' efforts to disarm Iraq peacefully – just as they were on the brink of a new and decisive phase of inspections.

Rai also shows how the power of the global anti-war movement came very close to stopping the war against Iraq: he reveals exclusive evidence that the British Government was forced to frantically draw up contingency plans to withdraw from the US invasion force only days before the war was due to begin – because of the power of worldwide protest.

Milan Rai founded the British branch of Voices in the Wilderness and co-founded the anti-war group ARROW, a London-based direct action and anti-war information group. His two previous books are War Plan Iraq and Chomsky's Politics. In 1993 he was awarded the Frank Cousins Peace Award for Research by the Transport and General Workers' Union.