Is this 'the end of post-2003 Iraq'?

In what is arguably the biggest shake-up of Iraq’s political system since the US-led invasion of 2003, the announcement of sweeping reforms to target corruption and political inefficiency by Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi over the weekend have been met with a mixture of encouragement and scepticism. The fact that the Iraqi parliament wasted no time in unanimously approving the measures has been held up as “a moment of rare agreement” in an otherwise bitterly divided country.

The reforms come in response to widespread protests as people took to the streets across Iraq to denounce corruption and inefficiency at the highest level. In particular, the recent mismanagement of energy and resources during the country’s summer heatwave led to anger and disillusionment among many. Last week, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shia Muslims, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, hinted at the need for political and social reforms during his Friday sermon. It seems, at least on the surface, that the government has taken need of the current climate. Most significantly, the changes involve the restructuring of the political establishment and the legal enforcement of corruption charges against members of the political and social elite.

As well as putting further measures in place to legislate against corruption and money laundering, Abadi has pledged to abolish a number of top political posts in a bid for greater political transparency and accountability. The posts in question, those of the three vice president and three deputy prime ministers, were originally put in place by the US-orchestrated administration in a misguided attempt to offer representation to the country’s varied ethnic and religious sects. These posts were allocated on a sectarian and affiliation basis and were widely regarded as fuelling further political fragmentation and sectarianism rather than the inclusivity for which they were intended.

The dismantling of this decade-old sectarian system, therefore, can arguably be said to mark “the end of the post-2003 Iraq,” as Maria Fantappie, Iraq analyst for the International Crisis Group, recently commented to the New York Times.

Others, however, are not so sure. Such changes are certainly to be welcomed, especially if they mark a genuine watershed moment in the political discourse of the country and may ultimately lead to a more unified and inclusive Iraqi political system, but there are still many obstacles that need to be overcome before these reforms can result in any kind of meaningful political and social change.

One such obstacle can be found in the figure of Nouri Al-Maliki, former Iraqi Prime Minister and current Vice President who was forced to step down as leader of the Islamic Dawa Party last year amid accusations of inciting sectarianism. Although Maliki, like other Iraqi ministers whose jobs have been put on the line by the recent announcement, voted in favour of the reforms, it is unlikely that Iraqi politics will so easily shake off the shadow of the man who so efficiently ran the country into the ground for nearly a decade and who has been compared by some to a watered-down version of Saddam Hussein.

“Maliki is not a person who will run away,” says Ali Al-Dabbagh, a former Iraqi government spokesman and official who is now one of Maliki’s most outspoken critics. “Maliki is going to stand in the face of all the steps relating to him being fired.”

If not the figure of Maliki himself, then it is the political and social system he presided over that has to be surmounted if Iraq is to emerge into a new era of political cooperation and unity. Many analysts have attributed the widespread territorial and ideological successes of extremist organisations such as Islamic State (Daesh) to the failure of Iraq’s Shia-dominated political class (which, through the entrenchment of networks of power and privilege has created a pseudo-sectarian system akin to that of Saddam’s Baath Party, dominated and president over by Maliki) to capture the imagination of the country’s sizeable Sunni population. The legacy of de-Baathification and the demonisation of Iraqi Sunnis in the years following 2003 has created a large swathe of disenfranchised and disillusioned Sunni Iraqis who feel that they have “no choice” but to join forces with Daesh and other militant organisations in order to gain any form of political voice. This, coupled with the failure of the Iraqi state to provide basic resources and infrastructure, as well as the meddling of neighbouring Gulf states and Iran, has led to the fracturing of Iraqi national sentiment along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Indeed, as many commentators have put it, the war against Daesh in Iraq must ultimately be won on the treacherous ground of political and ideological imaginaries before it can be won militarily. Only if Iraq’s Sunnis (and to a lesser extent Kurds) begin to once again feel included and invested in the plight of Iraq as a nation, will the support for Daesh and other such extremist groups wane. On the flip side, only by transcending such essentialist and misleading sectarian stereotypes and coming together under the banner of Iraqi nationalism will Iraq’s Shia community be able to cease their support of the numerous and shadowy Iranian-backed Shia militias and come to the political table as equals with their Sunni brethren.

The reforms announced this week by Abadi, if successful, may go some way towards addressing such concerns. The question remains, however, of whether it is simply too late for all that – of whether the spectrum of the country’s political and social reality has shifted so far in one direction as to ever be forcibly tamed back into the historical model of Iraqi nationalism. It is only by challenging and negating the sectarian political system through which the country has been operating for the past ten years (or arguably more) that Iraq will ever truly emerge as a unitary political actor.

And yet, even such hopeful statements belie the fact that Iraq, as an entity, has only ever been united when it has been dominated by one social and political faction above all others – which begs the question as to whether contemporary critics of Abadi’s new policies are truly invested in creating a more united and representative Iraq, or whether they simply yearn for an alleged past “golden era” in which it was themselves, and not others, who had the upper hand. Perhaps Iraq will never truly be united simply because it can’t be; perhaps the arbitrary borders enclosing such a diversity of peoples and desires are inevitably destined to disintegrate with the ravages of time.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.