Since the 2003 American invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq has not enjoyed the kind of extended period of stability that might allow the state to move beyond the turmoil that has plagued it since that moment. Perhaps it was natural for a state to experience such instability when a regime—or rather, the entire state—was overthrown and a new one established.
Those who planned for the regime’s overthrow, and the political actors involved in the process, did not entirely lack plans for building the new system. However, plans alone were insufficient to function in a society that was neither prepared for them nor compatible with them. Iraqi society had been sealed off from academic analysis and research for nearly three decades, enduring a totalitarian dictatorship, devastating wars, and a blockade that radically altered its nature. The pre-invasion plans, therefore, were designed for the Iraq of a bygone moment, or simply borrowed from international models.
This was not the only flaw that led to the detachment of these plans. Other examples around the world have shown that a successful transition is far from guaranteed in countries that experience power vacuums arising from the complete dismantling of their political structures. The persistence of state structures, in some form or another, can be a crucial factor in achieving a successful transition.
Indeed, in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as in many other cases around the world, it had been difficult to distinguish between the state and the regime. Since he was toppled, Iraq has become a stark warning to the world, and to influential actors worldwide, when considering regime change and subsequent transitions. The lessons of Iraq have echoes in similar cases, not least Venezuela and Iran.
The toppling of the regime led to conflicts over attitudes as to which parts of it should be accepted and integrated into the new system — the question of removing the old elite and replacing it with another, and the sectarianization of political conflicts, as well as the transition from a highly centralized to a decentralized state, and the role of regional and international actors, who did not contribute to creating a healthy environment in which the post-Saddam Iraqi experiment could flourish.
Iraq has experienced brief moments of calm, including after the defeat of Al-Qaeda and the crackdown on militias in 2008. This period of relative stability and hope ended with the crisis over forming the government in 2010, the repercussions of which culminated in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seizing a third of the country, including second city Mosul, in the summer of 2014.
Iraq’s liberation from ISIS in late 2017 seemed as if it could lead to a new atmosphere of openness and a certain degree of security, the likes of which the country had not seen since 2003.
This security environment produced several positive indicators, not least statistics showing the expansion of the middle class, progress in the reconstruction of infrastructure, a decline in poverty rates, and so on.
These developments, even partial, undoubtedly owe much to stability in the sense of security. Yet stability is not solely a security issue. In its comprehensive sense, it covers much more.
Stability has two other essential pillars which augment and reinforce the security dimension, such that all three form a cohesive whole:
- The political dimension, political stability (defined in academic terms as the regular flow of political exchanges), is fundamental to achieving overall stability.
- Stability, in both its security and political dimensions, must constitute a conception or a project, backed by the political will to achieve it. It cannot simply be imposed by certain power balances at a given moment, without any underlying political will.
I believe Iraq lacks these two dimensions of stability. In the years following its liberation from ISIS, the country saw major political turmoil, including its largest civil protest movement in Iraq’s recent history, the Tishreen (“October”) movement that broke out in that month of 2019. The government then resigned in the wake of a massacre, leading to the formation of a new government that held early elections, after which the winning party was excluded from forming the government, leading to the withdrawal of a major political actor from the political process. Protesters from this party stormed the parliament building, and the Speaker of Parliament was subsequently dismissed. Throughout all of this, controversy raged over the arms held by powerful militias operating in parallel with state armed forces, along with the persistently unstable and unprecedentedly strained relationship between the central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
It takes little effort to demonstrate that Iraq has not experienced political stability since its liberation from ISIS, but rather, a paradoxical situation: stability in the sense of security, juxtaposed with political instability.
I would argue that this stems from a lack of will to achieve stability in the broader sense, alongside a lack of vision for any political path that could lead to a more sustainable form of stability.
A reading of political developments in Iraq suggests that this void has entrenched a set of characteristics that have come to define the political system. Yet these are rarely discussed (except incidentally), as those who produce discourse on the Iraqi political system are preoccupied with secondary or less central issues.
These characteristics not only perpetuate the absence of political stability, but also undermine stability in the security sense. They include the following six factors:
- It has become increasingly clear that the relationship between the state and society in Iraqi is defined by what the social sciences describe as “clientelism,” a system in which political actors with influence within the state strike a deal with society and citizens, buying their loyalty and usurping their political choices in exchange for a range of in-kind benefits and services (which in theory should be part of their core duties and public responsibilities). One consequence of this clientelism has been one of the most extensive hiring sprees in the world, yet one that has produced a bloated and inefficient public sector that serves no purpose other than to burden the country’s economy. It should be noted here that clientelism is common in countries with hybrid regimes (mixing authoritarian and democratic elements), where competition between political factions, in turn, fosters clientelism within the framework of party-political competition. Clientelism can also thrive in countries undergoing transitions toward establishing fully-fledged authoritarian systems.
- Clientelism is embedded in the rivalry between political parties, while Iraqi citizens do not have equal access to the sources of rent, which are controlled by the ruling elite. This situation has widened class disparities to a degree unprecedented in Iraq for more than half a century.
- Given that “development” has become integral to clientelist politics, the formulation of development plans is guided by improvisation rather than long-term strategic planning. This makes it difficult to understand why certain elements of development are emphasized to the exclusion of others, not to mention that development itself is only partially understood, as I shall explain. The primary goal of “development” here is to buy political loyalty, which—for those who understand “development” in this way and want to quickly reap the benefits of this understanding—must be manifested in expressions of this loyalty through voting and other behaviors, without waiting for results in the long term.
- This clientelism, one element of the party-political rivalry underway within the hybrid system, was aided, or paralleled, by a process by which Iraqi society ceased to be a single entity, but rather a collection of “communals.” Accordingly, the clientelist system is fragmented, both among the divided Iraqi people and among various political parties. It could be argued that the descent into a “communal” state (i.e., the division of the people) is the product of a dynamic under which Iraq adopted (or had thrust upon it) a consociational system after the invasion, when the U.S. sought to redefine Iraq not as a nation-state, but as a state forming a framework encompassing a range of ethnic, religious, and sectarian identities. In principle, the consociational system should ensure the sharing of these groups in the institutions of power and decision-making. However, for reasons that cannot be discussed here, the Iraqi political elite failed to build a genuine consociational system, and consociational arrangements turned into mere formalities that did not guarantee any real partnership in power and decision-making. Given the failure of the consociational system, which inflated ethnic identities at the expense of the national identity and strengthened allegiances to the former at the expense of the latter—combined with sectarian politics that began to stack up in the years after the fall of the dictatorship, producing ethnic and sectarian struggle for dominance—Iraq produced an alternative to the consociational system, in the form of a communal system, in which the balance of power and access to decision-making were unevenly distributed among the respective elites of the various ethnic groups. This characteristic, which marked the years following Iraq’s liberation from ISIS, deprived the country of the only positive outcome of the bitter experience of ISIS: the formation, albeit temporarily, of a kind of immunity to sectarianism. The discourse of sectarian struggle for dominance, or even the trading of sectarian insults, came to prevail, instead of a discourse of confronting sectarianism and the hatred it breeds. What concerns us in this diagnosis is not a description of the sectarian situation in Iraq in recent years (although much more work is needed to understand that situation, its motives, sources, and causes), but rather to assert that Iraq lacks a comprehensive national project based on a unifying national identity, a project whose framework and scope are Iraq itself, not the sects. To reiterate, I do not wish to conclude here that there is a lack of a national project, but rather that the situation described here is a major factor in the lack of political stability, revealing the absence of both the vision and will to achieve it.
- The state of political instability in the years following the battle against ISIS, most notably manifested in the mass civil protest movement of Autumn 2019 and its subsequent repercussions—the biggest jolt to the Iraqi political system since 2003—has, in the minds of the ruling elite, created a path toward establishing an authoritarian system. As such, authoritarianism is seen as the necessary alternative to political instability (similar to the way in which authoritarianism has emerged in several other cases around the world). This “Iraqi trajectory” towards authoritarianism has been reinforced by the fact that this model of authoritarianism was adopted by political regimes in many parts of the Arab world after the setbacks to the 2011 uprisings. There is no doubt that what is happening in the Arab world has made the vision for this trajectory towards authoritarianism still clearer in the minds of the ruling Iraqi elite. This trajectory is embodied in efforts to close down the public sphere by shutting down the available civic spaces, including civil and political activity and arenas for freedom of expression, with the understanding that these spaces were important factors in the rise of the Tishreen movement. Many reports and essays have confirmed that the state of freedom of expression in Iraq over the past three years is at its worst since 2003.
- Thus, on top of the paradox between security stability and political turmoil, over recent years Iraq has faced another contradictory dynamic. This dynamic is characterized by a tension between a burgeoning development project, much hyped in the propaganda of official Iraqi political discourse (even if it has some tangible manifestations on the ground), and the systematic effort to shut down the public sphere, with all the implications for civil and political liberties in the country. This reveals that the concept of “development” at discussion among decision-makers in Iraq is only partial, limited to material reconstruction. In fact, it is identical to the concept of “development” adopted by Saddam Hussein, through which he was able to carry out perhaps the largest industrial and infrastructure projects in the history of the Iraqi state, using the revenues of the oil industry after it was nationalized (1972-1973). As such, this conception of “development” does not include—indeed overlooks—political development, which has become a fundamental pillar in understanding “development” in international literature on the subject. This reflects the deal underpinning the Iraqi political system: the state delivers development, in this limited sense, in exchange for citizens giving up civil and political liberties. Placing this issue in a regional context, one might argue that this deal is part of a general trend adopted by many Arab political regimes in their authoritarian trajectories—regimes that both influence and are influenced by the Iraqi political system.
These characteristics are not fleeting phenomena, but fundamental in the Iraqi political system that has emerged in recent years. They stem from the fact that politics in post-2003 Iraq (and indeed the state-building process itself) have been managed according to the logic of crisis and conflict management, resulting in short-term political tactics rather than a conscious project for building a sustainable form of stability.
The structures that emerge from these tactics, which may appear to be durable—such as sectarian and ethnic hegemony, authoritarianism, and clientelism—are, in reality, “landmines” in the body of the political system, ready to explode with any shift in the context that allows them to do so. A society that has tasted civil and political liberties cannot accept anyone trading them away, nor is clientelism sustainable in a volatile rentier economy. The imbalances in social justice that arise from such an economy cannot prevent the groups it harms from seeking justice at any cost, nor can the aspiration of an Iraqi identity, unleashed in moments of heightened tension, accept being reduced to a “system” of conflicting identities with varying degrees of Iraqi citizenship.
The explosion of these mines will not necessarily be peaceful. Numerous ideological guises are always waiting on the sidelines, ready to disguise any movement in this area.
Therefore, as the Iraqi political system stands at a new juncture over the formation of a new government, it is vital that the Iraqi political system decides to leave behind what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception” that has endured for over two decades, with its accompanying politics of improvisation and struggles for dominance. Instead, it must adopt a project aimed at forging lasting stability.
All the above merely lays out a set of principles. If Iraqi decision-makers had the conviction and will to embark on a different path from the one followed over the past two decades, then many more details would be up for discussion.