Iraq is falling apart

Iraq is becoming, or has become, a failed state. Some warned before the 2nd Iraq war that if the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, it would unleash forces and violence that the state could not contain. Those warnings have come to pass. The New York Times writes:

Politicians have failed to form a new government nearly a year after the last elections. Baghdad just saw its worst militia clashes in years. And despite vast oil wealth, the state can’t provide basic services.

.... apparent prosperity in parts of Baghdad belies what many Iraqi officials and citizens see as the crumbling foundation of the state — an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that the United States had intended to be free and democratic when it led an invasion 19 years ago to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein.

After the invasion, Iraq’s long-sidelined Shiite Muslim majority came to dominate government, and the power struggle between Shiite and Sunni political groups fueled a sectarian war. Now, in a dangerous threat to the country’s already tenuous stability, rival Shiite armed groups, the most powerful among them tied to neighboring Iran, are fighting each other, and are beyond the control of the central government.

“Internally, externally, at the political level and at the security level, Iraq is now a failed state,” said Saad Eskander, an Iraqi historian. “The Iraqi state cannot project its authority over its territory or its people.”

Iraq’s weaknesses once again came into sharp relief last week when a stalemate over forming a new government — almost a year after the last elections — exploded into violence in the heart of the capital.

Followers of the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the heavily guarded Green Zone in an antigovernment protest after Mr. Sadr announced he was withdrawing from politics. Then rival pro-Iranian Shiite paramilitary fighters on the public payroll began shooting at the protesters, and armed members of a Sadr militia emerged to fight them.

Ordered by the prime minister not to shoot at the demonstrators, government security forces were largely sidelined while the rival militias fought it out. After two days of fighting killed 34 people, Mr. Sadr ordered his followers to withdraw from the Green Zone, restoring an uneasy calm.  

Last month, the country’s respected finance minister, Ali Allawi, resigned with a stark warning that staggering levels of corruption were draining Iraqi resources and posed an existential threat.

“Vast underground networks of senior officials, corrupt businessmen and politicians operate in the shadows to dominate entire sectors of the economy and siphon off literally billions of dollars from the public purse,” Mr. Allawi wrote in his resignation letter to the prime minister. “This vast octopus of corruption and deceit has reached into every sector of the country’s economy and institutions: It must be dismantled at all costs if this country is to survive.”

As usual for that part of the world, corruption is rampant and endemic. Corruption is a nation killer, and arguably a potential civilization killer. What can save Iraq? Maybe the rise of a new dictator, just as brutal as Hussein, might do the trick. Democracy sure doesn't seem to be up to the task.

 

How the poor folks live

(no air conditioning)

Raw sewage flows down the street