The Anatomy of Regime Change: Transnational Political Opposition and Domestic Foreign Policy Elites in the Making of US Foreign Policy on Iraq 1 Wisam H. Alshaibi New York University, Abu Dhabi Scholars attribute the causes of the 2003 US war in Iraq to threats to national security or declining hegemonic power. The dominant ac- counts, however, fail to clarify how Iraqi regime change emerged as official US foreign policy, despite policymakers’ hostility toward such an objective throughout the 1990s. I highlight how the exiled Iraqi op- position to Saddam Hussein mobilized neoconservative policymakers to advocate for regime change. My account links transnational foreign policy lobbying to the epistemic structure of the field of foreign policy, emphasizing overlapping elite networks, epistemic fluency, and cul- tural fit as key factors driving the adoption of Iraqi regime change. Using novel archival records and interviews with the architects of US foreign policy on Iraq, I challenge the conventional accounts of the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War and contribute to research on the micropolitics of “big” policy change, the historical sociology of foreign policy, and transnationalism and state power. The George W. Bush administration’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hus- sein and draw the United States into a prolonged occupation of Iraq in 2003 © 2024 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/732155 1 I am deeply indebted to my mentors and peers at UCLA, where the majority of this paper was written: Gail Kligman, Rogers Brubaker, Michael Mann, Kevan Harris, Andreas Wimmer, Aslı Bali, Gabriel Rossman, Edward Walker, Ching Kwan Lee, Nihal Kayali, Zach Griffen, Gilad Wenig, Matías Fernández, John Sullivan, Patrick Reilly, Neil Gong, Joel Herrera, Rohan Advani, Sima Ghaddar, Lachlan McNamee, Gabriel Suchodolski, Julieta Goldenberg, and Isaac Jilbert. I also wish to thank Davide Carpano, Isaac Reed, AJS Volume 130 Number 3 (November 2024): 539– 594 539