The tragedy of Iraq, 20 years on

من الصحافة اخترنا لكم

Financial Times

The night President George W Bush announced to the world that a US-led coalition was invading Iraq, he said one of the aims was helping Iraqis to achieve “a united, stable and free country”. Yet 20 years since the first tanks rumbled across the border, the one thing that unites Iraqis is their sense of disillusionment at the state of their beleaguered nation. It is true that Iraqis have been able to vote in multiple elections since the monstrous dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. But after two decades in which they have suffered cycles of horrific violence and years of inept, corrupt government, Iraq is neither a functioning nor stable democracy. Successive elections have produced weak coalitions made up of rival factions more interested in enriching themselves and their patronage networks than developing the nation. The dominant political forces are aligned to armed Shia militant groups, most of which are backed by Iran. It is largely their whims that determine the country’s stability. Instead of a liberated Iraq showing “the power of freedom to transform the region”, as Bush promised, the US-led invasion became a byword for a catastrophic foreign intervention and the perils of pursuing regime change with no clear plan about what comes next. Even worse, a war fought on a false premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction damaged global trust in the US, and its claims to moral leadership. The damage still reverberates today. The Iraq war opened the door to neighbouring Iran to extend its influence across the region, shifting the power dynamics of the Middle East and stoking sectarian tensions. A US army study of the Iraq war released in 2019 concluded that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor”. The ousting of Saddam, a Sunni, empowered groups from the Shia majority, many with ties to the Islamic republic. The weakness and chaos of the postwar state also provided the fertile terrain for the birth of the Sunni jihadist group Isis. The US spent almost $20bn rebuilding Iraq’s security forces between 2003 and 2011 after foolishly disbanding Saddam’s Ba’ath party and the army. When faced with a major threat, a 2014 blitz by Isis across swaths of the country, the Iraqi army mostly melted away. It took four years of yet more conflict and the intervention of an international coalition to drive the jihadis from their strongholds. Though the security situation in Iraq has now stabilised, governance has not improved. Youth unemployment is rife and the state struggles to deliver basic services as ministries act as fiefdoms of political factions. Despite the tens of billions of dollars spent on Iraq’s reconstruction, the oil-rich state suffers regular electricity outages, particularly in the summer when temperatures soar past 50C. The militias affiliated to political factions regularly intimidate and sometimes kill those demanding better of their leaders. When frustrated young Iraqis took to the streets in 2019, more than 600 protesters were killed. At the latest parliamentary election, in 2021, just 36 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, a damning indictment of Iraqis’ despondency. It is not uncommon to hear Sunnis and Shia complain that life was better under Saddam. The only bright spot is the young generation of Iraqis who aspire for a better future: about 60 per cent of the population are aged under 25 and they will, one day, drive change. Until then, the legacy of a badly planned and badly fought war is the shattering of the Iraqi state and the fabric of Iraqi society.

الكاتب

Financial Times