Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Sunni and Shia alike, have been taking to the streets in cities across Iraq to protest their country’s failed political system and its rampant corruption. Although the demonstrations in Iraq have been going on for weeks, they are finally getting some coverage in western media. The issues at stake in these protests and the government’s responses to them are complex and there is a lot to say, but for this post I will focus on one aspect of these protests that I think is important for Americans to understand: sectarianism or, more accurately, the lack of it. So, why is Iraq’s government so corrupt?
The short answer: a political system set up by the U.S. based on faulty premises fosters both corruption and sectarianism. The current political system in Iraq is 16 years old and was originally set up under the direction of the U.S. after the 2003 invasion. Prevailing wisdom among American policy makers in Iraq considered the greatest challenge to achieving democracy in Iraq to be accommodating deeply entrenched sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Muslims (and Iraq’s ethnic Kurds). To solve this perceived challenge, U.S. envoy Paul Bremer oversaw the creation of a parliamentary democracy structured to divide power between Shia, Sunni, and other religious groups as well as the Kurdish ethnic minority. As a result, since 2003, the Iraqi political system has structured Iraqi citizens’ political participation through parties corresponding to ethnic or sectarian identities, thus politicizing sectarian identity and leading to rampant political corruption. How does the sectarian political system lead to corruption? First, access to government employment (usually the best jobs available) is guaranteed by pledging allegiance to one of the political parties promoting sectarian politics. That means that politicians control hiring policies and can give out much needed jobs as rewards for personal allegiance or crooked deals. Second, because political parties earn control of government ministries and their corresponding resources by mobilizing voters along ethno-sectarian lines, the parties that secure control of government ministries then exploit the resources of the ministry in their efforts to dominate the political field. As a result, necessities like water and electrical service are apportioned by corrupt government ministers to mobilize support for their party, resulting in unreliable services for everyone. The result is a tightly closed system of well-connected political and commercial elites who benefit politically and economically while most Iraqis lack basic services or access to meaningful employment. Imagine having a medical degree and being unemployed because you lack the political connections, all while Iraq suffers from an understaffed health-care system. You can’t pay your bills or take care of your aging parents well despite your highly lucrative skills and when election time rolls around the polls offer no prospects for anything different. Instead, you can’t even renew your state I.D. without spending a day traveling from office to office bribing officials. This is just one example of the ways that widespread corruption affects Iraqis every day. So, what are Iraqis doing about it? In recent years, Iraqi youth have begun regular demonstrations calling for an end to corruption. In recent weeks, they have been specifically demanding an end to the system of apportioning parliamentary and ministerial seats along sectarian lines. Several days ago, demonstrators in Karbala even attacked the Iranian Consulate there to protest Iranian influence in Iraq’s politics. The symbolic power of this is difficult to overstate. Iran, a Shia “Islamic Republic” that has meddled heavily in Iraqi politics since the 2003 invasion has done so largely claiming to intervein on behalf of Iraq’s Shia population, yet last week Sunnis and Shia protestors together attacked a potent symbol of Iranian influence in Iraq. This is an important turning point. Sunni and Shia together are demanding an end to the political system that treats them not as Iraqis, but as Sunni or Shia. This patriotic mass movement is not, however, an unprecedented development in Iraqi history. Since Iraq’s founding in 1920, some of its political parties have been sectarian based but its most prominent ones were not. In my time researching Iraqi history I have become quite used to hearing the refrain among Iraqis over forty that they grew up in Iraq not knowing who was Sunni and who was Shia. Those of us who followed the news coming out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion recall the sectarian violence of the Iraqi Civil War in 2006-2007 and the so-called Islamic State’s Caliphate in 2014-2017, but these extreme and tragic outbursts of sectarian violence sprung from the mistrust engendered by the sudden political and security vacuum in 2003 and the success of international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in stoking sectarian violence in Iraq. They are not representative of what Sunnis and Shias do when ‘left to their own devices.’ More than that, not all attempts by outside actors to use sectarianism to divide Iraqis has succeeded. In 1980, when Iraq went to war against Iran, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called on Iraq’s Shia to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Instead, Shia enlisted to fight for their country in a brutal eight-year war. Iraqi patriotism in Iraq proved stronger than Khomeini’s calls for sectarian solidarity. In other words, this recent show of patriotic civic action by Iraqi youth demanding an end to sectarian politics is not an anomaly. Instead, the severity of sectarian strife in the last sixteen years is an anomaly caused by specific historical events. It is normal for Iraqis to identify strongly as Iraqis even as they argue and debate about what Iraq’s politics, society, and culture should be like. In other words, civil disagreement. You know… Democracy. The capacity of Iraqis to demand democratic change and oppose sectarianism is greater than we often give them credit for. Instead of thinking, as U.S. policymakers did in 2003, that an outsider must concoct some creative way of making democracy work in Iraq, perhaps we should be thinking what part the outside world will have to play in supporting democratic change initiated from within. The challenge is not figuring out how to get Sunnis and Shias to work together. They already are. It is not figuring out how to get Sunnis and Shias to understand what democracy is and work for it. They do and they are. The challenge is to translate the desire of Iraqis for fair democratic representation and an end to corruption into a reality when the current politically corrupt system is so entrenched. How that will be achieved is not clear. Government responses to the demonstrations have resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few weeks, which have only fueled further unrest by protesters who are rejecting government reform proposals as insufficient. The current political elite in Iraq have too much invested in the status quo to alter it significantly. What is clear is that this is not a case of external powers needing to invent a solution to solve problems intrinsic to Iraqi society and culture. Outside attempts to address political challenges in Iraq have often harmed more than helped. The solutions, perhaps yet undetermined, will come from within Iraqi society itself. Outside powers will have a role to play, as no nation’s politics happen in a vacuum, but the role of powerful nations like the U.S. will only be helpful when our policies are informed by accurate notions of the realities at work in Iraq.
1 Comment
Thomas D. Cornell
11/16/2019 07:50:51 am
Thanks, Marc, for this brief, clear explanation of what we've started hearing about in the news.
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Marcus Smith, PhDMarcus is a historian specializing in Modern Middle East History CategoriesArchives |