The US-led military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a further development in the global economy of violence which has progressively not only made Iraqis redundant as national-political subjects but has also stripped them of civility, without which no form of power can become legitimate, and turned them into a 'disposable population.' The projection of global disorder onto Iraqi national borders made the country a testing ground for the USA to establish its sovereignty in the global space that had become 'paranoid' in post-11 September 2001. The promotion of democracy and freedom, the ethical companions of this imperial expansion, was a global transposition of the national role assumed by the liberal state as the agent that constitutes free people. Thus, the Truth of the liberal state as the giver of liberty was deployed by the imperial power as the agent destined to turn the Truth into the Goal (Telos) of history, of which everyone, Iraqis or otherwise, becomes a subject at the expense of being a historical subject -- acting in history. Far from expanding, however, a democratic politics in which power and right are kept apart through recourse to the notion of legality, the military invasion was a juridical exercise of power in which right becomes the right of the ruler to rule. Without politics and a hegemonic construction of the universal mediated by association of citizens the fear of the Other remained uncivilised. While the global ruler has perpetuated and normalised this fear through recourse to the notion of 'just war' the Iraqi 'surrogates' for popular intervention have launched with a deadly consequence their own version of this notion.