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Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart - Foreign Affairs
Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart - Foreign Affairs
Iraq may look calm, but looks can be deceiving. The country is actually
entering a uniquely dangerous period: Iran’s allies have achieved
unprecedented control of Iraq’s parliament, judiciary, and executive
branch, and they are rapidly rigging the political system in their favor and
looting the state of its resources. Washington’s complacent attitude toward
these events is only setting it up for costly involvement later. Iraq is the
world’s third-largest oil producer and a country whose collapse could
destabilize the entire Middle East through the spread of refugees and
terrorism. Great-power competition has never been an excuse to tune out
the threats facing the country—and it shouldn’t be one now.
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
2003 history. It is ruling with a level of unchecked authority that Iraq has
not seen since the days of Saddam Hussein. Sudani is a puppet: while the
prime minister is an experienced public sector manager and a hard worker,
he leads Iraq in name only and is openly disparaged by Tehran’s allies in
Baghdad. The real powers are three warlords, each closely tied to Iran, at
the top of the Coordination Framework: U.S.-designated terrorist Qais
al-Khazali, the head of the Iran-trained Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia; former
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; and the leader of the Iran-founded Badr
Organization, Hadi al-Amiri.
For many years, these three politicians were partly held in check by a
patchwork of opponents. During the U.S. occupation from 2003 to 2011
and again during the war against the Islamic State (ISIS) from 2014 to
2019, Washington worked assiduously to prevent the militias from
gaining control of too many levers of state power. Iraqi protesters have
also acted as a check on the power of the Iran-backed groups—their mass
demonstrations in 2019 brought down the militia-controlled Prime
Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi. And during Iraq’s most recent elections,
Sadr tried to rally a cross-sectarian and multiethnic majority to form a
cabinet that excluded the Coordination Framework.
Today, these sources of opposition have all fallen away. Sadr’s electoral
gambit failed because of the judiciary’s intervention, and his movement is
now out of power and licking its wounds. The Iran-backed militias also
have nothing to fear from the cowed and despondent youth protesters.
Meanwhile, the United States is distracted by its geopolitical struggle with
China and has reduced its goals to simply de-escalating tensions across
the Middle East—no matter the long-term cost to U.S. interests in the
region.
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
Most important, the group directs the actions of the judiciary to an extent
that has not been seen since Saddam’s fall. Iraq’s most senior judge, Faiq
Zaydan, is a close ally of the warlords at the top of the Coordination
Framework. Under his leadership, Iraq’s Supreme Court has intervened
decisively in the country’s politics to perpetuate the militias’ power. At
precisely the moment the Coordination Framework needed to block
Sadr’s 2021 electoral victory, the court changed the rules of government
formation—ruling that Sadr needed a two-thirds supermajority in
parliament, rather than a simple majority, to form a government.
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
Finally, the Coordination Framework is looting Iraqi state resources for its
own political advantage. Iran-backed groups have established a state
company that is actively consolidating state assets, using much the same
approach as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Furthermore, these groups have overseen the massive expansion of Iraq’s
budget in an effort to buy the population’s support as they consolidate
power.
Whenever the time has come to choose a new prime minister in recent
years, the Iran-backed militias have asked each of the shortlisted
candidates whether they would support the creation of a company along
these lines. In 2018, Prime Minister Adel Abdel-Mahdi said yes and
received militia support for his appointment as premier, but the U.S.
government prevented the formation of the company. When Prime
Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi took over as a midterm replacement
premier in 2020, he had the political support to refuse to allow the
company to form—and then refused again in 2022 when Tehran’s allies
proffered it as the price for his receiving a four-year second term. The
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
This reckless level of spending ignores the warnings of the United States,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, which
have called on Iraq to reduce its bloated public sector. The Coordination
Framework is trying to buy the goodwill of Iraq’s political factions and its
population through unsustainable spending, including the creation of at
least 701,000 new government jobs—a 17 percent increase in government
employees in a single year. For example, the PMF is set to grow from
122,000 to 238,000 paid members, a 95 percent increase in the number of
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1130400 8/11
6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
The United States doesn’t need to send troops or billions of dollars to help
reverse the dangerous trends in Iraq. U.S. financial and intelligence
capabilities can still have a significant impact on the actions of Iraqi
officials—many of whom have higher political ambitions and interests in
international commerce and banking. For instance, according to U.S.
diplomatic sources, Faiq Zaydan was deeply distressed when three U.S.
Congress members sent a letter to Biden in February that named Zaydan
as a potential sanctions target. The United States needs to use leverage
such as this—privately at first—to signal its concern about the state of
Iraq’s judiciary and its key leadership.
The United States must also make good on its promise to uphold
American values of democracy and human rights in Iraq. In his May
address, Sullivan stressed that supporting U.S. values is one of the five
pillars of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. In Iraq today, this
means pushing back on Baghdad’s draconian restrictions on social media
use, investigative journalism, and political satire—all hallmarks of
dictatorship in the making.
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6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
Most urgently, the United States should work to isolate the Muhandis
General Company from the Iraqi economy before it contaminates the
country’s investment landscape. The firm represents an attempt to strip the
assets of a major industrial nation for the financial benefit of U.S.-
designated terrorists and human rights abusers, who are the primary
beneficiaries of the company. To the U.S. government’s credit, the
Muhandis General Company is already the subject of considerable
scrutiny by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets
Control and the U.S. Office of the Coordinator on Global Anti-
Corruption, but this needs to be translated into sanctions designations.
The United States can position itself on the right side of history in Iraq if
it continues to push back energetically against the worst excesses of the
militias that stand behind the current government. Even amid its
competition with China and the war in Ukraine, Washington can still use
its voice and unmatched financial and intelligence capabilities to weaken
antidemocratic forces and give Iraq’s youth, reformers, and anticorruption
investigators the opportunity to defend the fragile democracy that still—
barely—exists in Iraq.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1130400 10/11
6/7/23, 10:34 AM Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart | Foreign Affairs
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