Iraqis are fed up. Even as they wage war on the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS),1
they are also battling their own country’s corrupt and
ineffective political elite. Since the summer of 2015, Iraqis have turned
out to protest in record numbers in order to demand change. On 30 April
2016, protestors led by followers of populist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr
penetrated Baghdad’s heavily fortified and deeply despised International
Zone (or “Green Zone”), overrunning the country’s parliament, destroying
property, and assaulting several parliamentarians. The protesters
demanded accountability for corruption and the replacement of the entire
cabinet with nonpolitical technocrats. These chaotic scenes at once
demonstrated the depth of popular anger at the entrenched political elite
and the impotence of Iraqi state institutions. In the following days, the
circulation on social media of photos of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi
inspecting a destroyed couch in the parliament building invited scorn for
his apparent concern about a piece of furniture while millions of Iraqis
live without security, electricity, jobs, and clean drinking water.
It may surprise some that an Iraqi group or movement, especially one
rooted in the majority Shia population, would seek to challenge a Shialed
government at a time when the country faces the existential threat
of ISIS. But Iraqis of all ethnic and sectarian stripes, not just Sunnis
and Kurds, are tired of the ineptitude and corruption of their political
leaders, political parties, and government institutions; hence, the protest
movement was neither sectarian nor religious. Iraqis also blame politiJournal
of Democracy Volume 27, Number 4 October 2016
© 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 111
cians for having squandered the country’s fortunes when oil prices were
high. More recently, record-low prices have severely decreased government
revenue and worsened the quality of already poor public services
and infrastructure. The Iraqi army’s shameful retreat in the face of the
initial ISIS onslaught in 2014, as well as its inability to prevent the
massive bombs planted in Baghdad by ISIS in summer 2016, were just
further evidence of political dysfunction, corruption, and state weakness
in Baghdad.2
It is most telling that, in early 2016, many more Iraqis saw
as the central obstacle to progress in Iraq the failure of political parties,
rather than ISIS or falling oil prices.3
Since 2004, Iraqis have written and ratified (in 2005) a democratic
constitution and held regular national and local elections. There is
a lively media sector, and civil society groups operate throughout the
country. On these narrow parameters, Iraqis are freer than many of their
fellow Arabs, save for Tunisians, Moroccans, and Lebanese. Yet the
protest movement of 2015–16 has put a harsh spotlight on two central
and interrelated failings of Iraq’s post-2003 order that have led to unprecedented
levels of popular discontent: 1) the entrenchment of a selfinterested,
corrupt “partyocracy” that has captured the state and deepened
sectarian divisions; and 2) weak state institutions and the lack of
rule of law, which encourage unparalleled levels of corruption and have
fostered broad popular distrust toward state institutions among large
swaths of the public.
Images of “people power”–style antigovernment protests in Baghdad
and other Iraqi cities over the past year bring to mind those in Cairo,
Tunis, and Sana’a during the “Arab Spring” in 2011. Yet while Egyptian,
Tunisian, and Yemeni protestors mobilized against unaccountable
and undemocratic autocrats, Iraqis’ outrage has been directed toward the
ruling clique for whom they voted in multiple elections. A closer look at
the origins and development of Iraq’s partyocracy—the clutch of parties
that dominate public life and have captured the Iraqi state and its institutions
since 2003—helps to explain the roots of popular anger toward it.
In the period following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation
of Iraq, a constellation of mostly religious Shia actors and parties swept
into Baghdad on the “backs of tanks,” as Iraqis say to emphasize the link
between the invasion and the previously exiled political elite. These persons
and parties came to dominate the post-Saddam transition, gradually
eliminating alternatives to their rule. Many belonged to Shia Islamist
opposition movements—including the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI; later the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq,
or ISCI), its previously affiliated Badr Brigade, and Dawa (Islamic Call
Party)—that had spent decades trying to dislodge Saddam Hussein and
his Baath Party regime from power.
Some figures, such as former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of
Dawa, had spent many years in the West. Others had close ties to Iran;
112 Journal of Democracy
some had even fought on Tehran’s side in the Iran-Iraq war and pledged
loyalty to the Iranian revolution. Other exiled dissidents, such as the
secular-minded Ayad Allawi (who would serve as interim prime minister
in 2004–2005 and vice-president in 2014–15) and Ahmad Chalabi,
benefited from millions of dollars of support from the United States
and United Kingdom during the Saddam years and were handpicked
by the Bush administration to participate in Iraq’s post-Saddam interim
Governing Council (2003–2004). Still others, including Nuri al-Maliki
(prime minister from 2006 to 2014), had spent years in neighboring
countries working for Dawa, which at the time was plotting clandestine
operations to overthrow the Saddam regime.
The 2003 invasion was an opportunity for these exiles to realize their
decades-long dream of overthrowing Saddam and giving Iraq’s oppressed
Shia majority the opportunity to rule. Besides enjoying the support of the
U.S. occupation authority (the 2003–2004 Coalition Provisional Authority,
or CPA), many members of the emerging Shia political class benefited
from the backing of Iran, which also saw tremendous opportunities to
promote its interests in the post-Saddam order. Iraq’s new elites installed
themselves in Baghdad’s International Zone, taking over the walled villas
and other facilities previously occupied by the Baathist elite.
Also important was the Sadrist Trend (which later inspired the alAhrar
political bloc), an indigenous Shia Islamist political force that
emerged after 2003. Its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, was the heir to a prominent
Shia clerical family in Najaf that was distinguished by its political
activism (in contrast to the “quietism” of Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani) and vocal opposition to the Saddam regime.
Muqtada’s father and uncle were allegedly killed by the former regime,
but the Sadr family largely remained in Iraq and continued to champion
the needs of the masses of Shia poor. This meant that Muqtada, along
with the Kurdish politicians, was among the few post-2003 Iraqi political
elites who had a genuine domestic political base. In contrast to the
former exiles, who owed their positions to the United States, Muqtada
used anti-American nationalist messages to appeal to marginalized Shia.
He formed a militia, the Jaysh al-Mahdi, which played a role in both the
anti-U.S. insurgency and the sectarian conflict of the 2000s. Muqtada
has managed, albeit in a mercurial and populist fashion, to mobilize
large numbers of people at key junctures, most recently by jumping on
the protest bandwagon.
Non-Shia parties also entered the post-Saddam vacuum. The two
most powerful Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), fought a civil war against
each other in the 1990s, but later worked together to establish a quasiindependent
state (Kurdistan) in Iraq’s three northern provinces. After
2003, they quickly gained a place in the interim governing structures.
Their pre-2003 ruling elites, who already had close ties with the
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 113
United States, quickly became part of the Shia-led ruling establishment
in Baghdad, in addition to governing their own autonomous region in
the north. The Sunni Arabs also had elites who came to Baghdad “on
the backs of tanks” in 2003, among them the leadership of the Muslim
Brotherhood–affiliated Iraqi Islamic Party. After boycotting the first
post-Saddam elections in 2005, Sunnis formed the National Forces Alliance,
a political bloc that purports to represent the interests of Iraq’s
embattled Sunni minority, but is seen by many ordinary Sunnis as a part
of the failed, graft-ridden political machine.
It is worth highlighting here the “baggage” that the former exiles
brought with them to Iraq and how deeply this baggage has influenced
the trajectory of the partyocracy. For some, Iraq’s emerging political elite
was tainted by its association with the U.S. invasion and its dubious justification
on the grounds of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. In
addition, since most of the new elites had long been based outside of Iraq,
they were thought by many to be out of touch with the country’s current
reality. The protagonist of The Rope, Kanan Makiya’s 2016 novel about
postinvasion Iraq, offers this description: “They look like us, because they
were born among us, but they no longer think or feel like us . . . they live
in Baghdad in heavily guarded compounds . . . they avoid us ordinary
Iraqis . . . they are revolutionaries in words alone.”4
Most had operated for decades in secretive, undemocratic, conspiratorial,
and closed opposition movements, many of which were sectarian
Iraq’s Main Political Parties, circa 2015–16
Party Leader Coalition Ethnosectarian
Affiliation
No. of
MPs
Badr Organization Hadi al-Amiri State of Law Shia 21
Dawa Party
(multiple factions)
Nouri al-Maliki State of Law/
National Alliance
Shia 61
Al-Ahrar Party Dia al-Asadi National Alliance Shia 34
Fadhila Party Ammar Tuma National Alliance Shia 6
National Reform
Trend
Ibrahim alJaafari
National Alliance Shia 6
Islamic Supreme
Council (ISCI)
Ammar alHakim
Al-Muwatin/
National Alliance
Shia 31
Mutahidoon Usama alNajaifi
Etihad Sunni 28
Al-Arabiya Saleh al-Mutlaq Etihad Sunni 12
Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP)
Masoud Barzani Kurdish Alliance Kurdish 25
Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK)
Barham Salih Kurdish Alliance Kurdish 21
Gorran Nawshirwan
Mustafa
Kurdish Alliance Kurdish 9
Wataniya Ayad Allawi Al-Wataniya Nonsectarian 29
Note: Religious and ethnic minorities and various independents fill the remaining 35 seats
in the Iraqi Council of Representatives.
114 Journal of Democracy
or religious in character, and thus were wholly unprepared to lead modern
democratic political parties. Sectarianism as a means of legitimation
became especially attractive for those obsessed with victimhood at the
hands of Saddam but with no real indigenous support base, political platform,
or power. Moreover, the exile leaders did not trust one another,
making it hard for them to cooperate for the good of the country (a trend
exacerbated by the plethora of parties that emerged after 2003, many of
which entered the first parliament due to low electoral thresholds).
Finally, while the CPA saw the exiles as potential intermediaries
between the international administrators brought in to run state institutions
and their Iraqi staff, the exile elites’ lack of administrative—or
indeed any meaningful—experience made them very poor managers.
Iraqi lawyer Zaid Al-Ali writes, “They hid their lack of qualifications
behind a screen of deceit, arrogance and supreme self-confidence,
which only served to worsen the situation.”5
De-Baathification, a policy
that was initiated by the CPA and implemented with increased vigor
by Iraqi elites after 2004, purged tens of thousands of civil servants
(from agency heads to primary-school teachers) based on Baath Party
association rather than on conduct.6
This policy emptied the bureaucracy
of managers who may have been corrupt or inefficient, but it
replaced them with politically connected exiles and their local loyalists,
who had no idea how to run agencies and were at least as corrupt
as their Baathist predecessors.
How Ethnosectarianism Prevailed
How did the partyocracy become entrenched and succeed over time
in eliminating genuine alternatives to its rule? The answer begins with
muhasasa, a term I heard repeated frequently and with much disdain by
Iraqis from all walks of life during the 2015–16 year of protest. Muhasasa
is translated as “quotas,” but in the Iraqi context it refers to the informal
system by which Iraq’s partyocracy has divided the state among
its members. One part of muhasasa involves the ethnosectarian division
of power. Unlike postconflict power-sharing provisions in Lebanon or
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq’s arrangement is not codified in the constitution
but has instead become the de facto practice through which
certain positions are doled out to particular sects: The president is a
Kurd; the prime minister, a Shia; and the speaker of parliament, a Sunni.
The roots of ethnosectarian muhasasa lie in the CPA, which believed
that stability would be served by an interim Governing Council that
reflected the country’s ethnosectarian balance.7
Over time, the idea of
large ethnosectarian electoral blocs dividing power among themselves
became ingrained in Iraq’s political system. Sectarian feelings and policies
(as well as authoritarianism) intensified under the rule of Prime
Minister Maliki, especially during his second term (2010–14).8
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 115
In the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who took to the
streets in 2015 and 2016 to protest muhasasa (among other things),
sectarian quotas are directly responsible for Iraq’s poor governance.
A majority of Iraqis surveyed in 2016 named ending the quota system
as the most important step that the country could take toward political
reconciliation.9
Iraqis resent a practice that values membership in a particular
group over merit and has led to the installation of incompetent
and corrupt elites. Furthermore, muhasasa incentivizes political parties
to organize and mobilize around ethnic and sectarian identity, thereby
deepening sectarian rifts and conflict. As a result of muhasasa and a party-list
electoral system, sectarianism became the most reliable platform
on which to contest elections.10 Indeed, many Iraqis have even come to
see sectarianism as something that the ruling political parties created
in order to maintain their privileges and power and then reinforced by
deploying their affiliated armed groups.
The Shia parties made de-Baathification a centerpiece of their agenda,
while Sunnis came to see this as a deliberate attempt to marginalize
them from post-Saddam political and economic life (some have referred
to de-Baathification as “de-Sunnification”). They blame the Shia parties
for inciting the 2006–2008 sectarian conflict in which party-affiliated
militias played the leading role, as well as for the more recent years of
sectarian rule under Maliki.
Of course, ethnosectarian divisions in Iraq have roots that long predate
2003: The Baathist crackdown on Kurds in the 1970s and 1980s
and Saddam’s repression of the southern Shia uprising after the 1991
Gulf War were particularly important in galvanizing ethnic and sectarian
identities. Several other episodes of large-scale sectarian conflict
occurred in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. But as
the post-Saddam transition progressed, the role of the muhasasa system
in mobilizing ethnosectarian sentiment became clear. Today, 95 percent
of Iraqis see politicians and parties as “very responsible” for creating
divisions and hindering reconciliation—more than the 89 percent who
see ISIS as “very responsible” for fomenting sectarian division.11
The second part of the reviled muhasasa system is the divvying up of
state institutions among various parties within the ethnosectarian blocs.
Over the past thirteen years of transition, parties have “colonized” the
ministries in Baghdad, which never got beyond their Baathist, neosocialist
roots as bloated, inefficient bodies presiding over an enormous workforce
and Iraq’s unreformed state-driven, oil-dependent economy. Iraqi
government bodies have the power to award billions of dollars in contracts,
and they employ approximately 3.5 million people, in addition to
providing electricity, fuel, various services, and even food. Control of
particular ministries has become a major source of patronage and corruption,
and thus a vital interest of the political parties—hence their fierce
opposition to calls for a technocratic government.
116 Journal of Democracy
After every election, there are ferocious battles for control of ministries,
with the biggest prizes—ministries such as Oil, Transport, and
Electricity that award lucrative contracts—going to the most powerful
parties. Over time, certain political groups have become so entrenched
in particular ministries—for example, the Badr Organization (formed
from the Badr Brigade in 2012) at the Interior Ministry—that they are
seen as “owning” the institution, and fiercely oppose any policies that
might threaten their position. Ministries, in turn, control positions in a
host of provincial-level directorates and other state-run bodies (such as
universities) that are equally important sources of patronage.
The lack of a legal framework for regulating the activities of political
parties also has helped to enable Iraq’s partyocracy. As Zaid al-Ali notes,
Iraqis have no way of knowing where parties get their money, where and
how they keep it, and what they do with it.12 Parliament has never passed
a comprehensive law on political parties, and the lack of regulation and
oversight allows them to use government funds and state resources to
buy votes. Parties have also gained millions of dollars in kickbacks for
granting (through the ministries under their control) contracts to foreign
companies. Moreover, parties “own large tracts of land, businesses and
media empires, and employ thousands of people. Each has become a state
in its own right.”13 In the 2010 election, Maliki’s State of Law Coalition
gave golden revolvers to southern tribal leaders in exchange for their
support. At other times, parties have handed out state jobs, state-owned
land, and cash that they have stolen from the state.
Finally, militias have played a central role in fending off challenges
to the primacy of the partyocracy. The 2005 elections brought to power
parties such as SCIRI (later ISCI), long tied to the Badr Brigade militia
that had operated in Iran as an armed wing of the opposition to Saddam.
In 2012, the renamed Badr Organization split from ISCI and formed its
own eponymous political party (while continuing to operate a militia),
and ISCI started a new militia, the Ashura Brigades. Other militias, such
as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (later disbanded and reconstituted
as the Peace Brigades), were formed after 2003 and had no ties to earlier
groups. Eventually all the major parties came to rely on affiliated
militias to protect their interests and, at times, to intimidate journalists,
protestors, and other political opponents.
The militias filled the void created by the CPA’s disbanding of the
Iraqi army and police and formed what became the de facto security sector
in many towns, cities, and regions, while simultaneously providing
vital sources of employment. Yet these armed groups also engaged in
criminal activity, thereby playing the roles of both “arsonist and firefighter”
in Iraq’s post-2003 chaos. This led to a vicious cycle in which
many militias argued that they could not disarm so long as the state
was unable to provide security, which only further enfeebled the state.
Adding to the militias’ legitimacy was Sistani’s 2014 fatwa calling on
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 117
all able-bodied Shia men to fight ISIS. While new militias have formed
since 2014, previously existing groups (especially those tied to Iran)
have been leading the charge against ISIS under the state-sanctioned
Popular Mobilization Forces (hashd al-sha’abi) umbrella, a fact that
they publicize on affiliated party-militia television stations and on the
ubiquitous militia and martyr posters that cover Iraqi cities and towns.
Meanwhile, there were numerous reports of party-affiliated militias intimidating
peaceful protestors in 2015–16.
So it was that the Iraqi parties, like a devastating cancer, spread to
every organ of the state, the economy, and the informal security sector.
Party and state have become virtually indistinguishable, with political
blocs divvying up state agencies and control of resources like bereaved
relatives dividing the family estate among themselves. But capture by
the parties weakened the state’s capacity to carry out its most basic duties,
such as maintaining a monopoly on the use of force and controlling
the country’s borders.
While Saddam’s regime had been corrupt and repressive, it was at
least able to maintain order, unlike the post-2003 partyocracy. Civil
society, which had never existed under Saddam, had little time to develop
after 2003 before security broke down, and it was unable (at
least until 2015) to challenge either the parties’ strength and resources
or the militias’ violence and intimidation.14 While Ayad Allawi’s alWataniya
coalition (successor to the al-Iraqiya coalition) presented a
nonreligious, nonsectarian alternative, both al-Wataniya and Allawi
himself came to be seen as just as corrupt and ineffective as the powerful
Shia religious parties and their leaders. In 2016, most of the same
individuals and groups that took the reins of power in 2003–2004 remain
in control of the state, while alternatives to their rule appear
weak or nonexistent.
The Protest Movement Emerges
In the hot summer of 2015, things came to a head as oil prices fell,
the army failed to defend the country against ISIS, reports of high-level
corruption continued, and electricity and clean water remained scarce.15
Mounting frustration over these issues drove Iraq’s relatively weak and
fragmented civil society groups to unite in a call for nationwide protests
to demand sweeping changes in the prevailing system of governance.
Although Iraq witnessed large antigovernment protests in 2011 and
2012, those were mostly confined to Sunni areas and focused on Sunnispecific
grievances. This time, civil society led the protests, which were
not sectarian and took place in almost every city and province (except
those controlled by ISIS), including in Kurdistan. In August 2015, tens
of thousands of protestors filled Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and nearby
streets—some were demanding the dismissal of corrupt ministers, while
118 Journal of Democracy
others were calling for deeper changes to the constitutional order, including
a secular state.
The Partyocracy Strikes Back
The ferocity with which the partyocracy resisted this challenge from
the street demonstrated just how threatened party leaders felt. They pulled
out all the stops to thwart and discredit the protests, blaming foreign powers
and accusing the protestors of being either anti-Islam or pro-Baathist.
Numerous reports also suggest that the parties deployed their affiliated
militias to intimidate, beat, and humiliate civic-activist protestors.
Transport Minister Baqir Jabr al-Zubeidi, a member of the ISCI-led
Muwatin coalition, claimed that “dubious political parties stand behind
this protest and wanted to stir chaos, annoy the citizens and humiliate
the government.” Former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki issued a number
of statements strongly opposing the protests and protesters. He said in
an interview that “the protests went outside of the framework they should
have stayed within because of their use of slogans against religion and
Islamic movements.”16 Elsewhere, Maliki played on Shia fears of the
former regime, claiming that the protestors were Baathists and members
of Saddam’s Republican Guard. Qais al-Khazali, a leader of the
pro-Iranian militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq, criticized Abadi’s reform agenda,
saying that it was distracting the government from the war against ISIS.
Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister chosen to replace Maliki in August
2014 after the latter’s humiliation at the hands of ISIS, was forced
to confront the outpouring of popular anger. On 9 August 2015, Abadi,
backed by Sistani (who had explicitly called on Abadi to prosecute senior
figures accused of corruption), announced a sweeping package of
reforms designed to eliminate waste, fight corruption, and improve public
services. Parliament approved it two days later. Abadi’s proposed
reforms included the elimination of the vice-presidencies, four ministries,
and a number of government commissions; the merger of eight
ministries; the dismissal of 123 unnamed deputy ministers and directors
general from across 23 ministries and agencies; the introduction of a
program to evaluate the performance of ministries; the elimination of
paid advisors at ministries; the elimination of discretionary funds for
government agencies; the cancellation of government contracts not in
conformity with standards; reductions in the salaries of civil servants;
adoption of measures pushing accountability for corruption; and an end
to sectarian and partisan quotas. These measures faced fierce resistance
from most of the party establishment, and by the end of October 2015,
they remained largely unimplemented. Then, on November 2, the Iraqi
parliament voted to revoke any mandate for Prime Minister Haider alAbadi
to conduct further reforms without consulting the parties.
Following a period of sustained activity, the protest movement lost
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 119
steam in the fall of 2015. After months of repeatedly prodding the politicians
to heed the people’s calls, a frustrated Ayatollah Sistani went
silent. That same month, Abadi announced plans to replace current
ministers with nonparty “technocrats.” Not long after, Muqtada al-Sadr
jumped on the reform bandwagon—he led a rally of a hundred-thousand
people in Baghdad, called on his followers to occupy the Green Zone,
and demanded the appointment of the technocratic cabinet promised by
Abadi. Muqtada managed to marshal some of the civic activists who had
been on the frontlines of protest in 2015 to join him, turning a fading
protest movement into a major national force.17
Hardly a democratic figure, and one affiliated with the al-Ahrar party
(widely perceived as corrupt), Muqtada had nonetheless successfully
placed himself in the vanguard of the proreform protest movement. The
Sadrists, emboldened and buoyed by their increasing popularity, began to
coopt the civil society groups that had led the protests in 2015, helping
to swell the protest numbers. Although the two protest groups (Sadrists
and civic activists) had very different ideological orientations, they were
united, at least temporarily, by their fury at the corrupt partyocracy.
In late March 2016, following weeks of sit-ins in front of the Green
Zone, Muqtada gave Abadi a deadline to propose the new technocratic
ministers. When that deadline passed, Sadrist protesters stormed the Green
Zone and parliament on April 30, meeting little resistance. The security
forces stationed there appeared to embrace the Sadrists, with one general
kissing Muqtada’s hand, a sign of submission. Muqtada also ordered parliamentarians
from the al-Ahrar party to stop participating in legislative
proceedings and fired several who had been accused of corruption.
On May 20, the Sadrist protesters accused Abadi of failing to follow
through on promises to fight corruption and again stormed the Green
Zone. This time, security forces responded harshly, with tear gas and
live ammunition. Several protestors were killed. Muqtada, perhaps
shaken by the escalation of violence and likely reined in by Iran, secluded
himself in the Iranian city of Qom (where he had lived until 2011
after fleeing Iraq in 2007) and ceased protest activity. By mid-July, he
was again calling for a “revolution” against “the [ISIS] of terror” and
the “the [ISIS] of corruption in the current government.”18 Turnout was
smaller, however, and some civic activists were now signaling a break
in their alliance with Muqtada.
In response to Muqtada’s movement, the parties tried to outdo each
other in calling for reforms, though with little sincerity. It was abundantly
clear that groups such as ISCI, Badr, and the Kurdish parties
were terrified of losing control over key ministries and agencies that
were irreplaceable sources of graft and patronage. A group of ostensibly
proreform parliamentarians voted to oust the Sunni speaker, Salim
al-Jabouri, a move that was later declared illegal by the Iraqi Federal
Court. Anti-ISIS liberation operations in the city of Fallujah in May and
120 Journal of Democracy
June 2016 helped to give both the prime minister and the parties some
breathing room, at least in the short term.
On 19 July 2016, Abadi accepted the resignation of seven Shia cabinet
ministers from the ISCI, Ahrar, and Badr parties as part of an internal
deal to satisfy the demands for change. On 25 August 2016, the parliament
sacked Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi, the result of wrangling
within the Sunni political bloc. Neither development, however, guaranteed
the kind of reforms demanded by the protestors and promised by
Abadi in 2015.
State Weakness, Corruption, and Illegitimacy
Over the past year, Iraqis have directed much of their rage at corruption.
There are a number of structural factors that have encouraged weak
rule of law in Iraq: a legacy of corruption from the Saddam years, especially
during the period of sanctions (1991–2003); the “resource curse”
of oil dependency; the security breakdown after 2003, which facilitated
impunity and led to the targeting of officials charged with countering
it; massive inflows of foreign aid; a weak, politicized judiciary; constitutional
weaknesses (including insufficient and vague competencies
granted to the central government); and legal and regulatory gaps that
have inhibited the enforcement of transparency and accountability.
Corruption has had an enormous impact on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.
Despite being classified as a middle-income country and having one
of the largest budgets in the Middle East, Iraq has been among the least
effective countries in the region at improving the lives of ordinary citizens.
Roads, schools, hospitals, power stations, water, and other public
infrastructure and services are in appalling shape for a country with its
level of income. During my travels in southern Iraq between August
2015 and August 2016, I was continually amazed by the degree of abject
poverty and the dire state of services and infrastructure.
Iraq ranks near the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index, ahead only of the likes of Afghanistan, Angola,
Libya, North Korea, South Sudan, Sudan, and Somalia. Iraq’s enfeebled
judiciary is a principle enabler of impunity. To compensate for the weak
judiciary, special independent institutions were created after 2003 to
deal with corruption and enforce the rule of law. In 2004, the CPA ordered
the Board of Supreme Audit (BSA), an old Iraqi institution, to refer
corruption charges to newly created inspectors general (IGs), within
the appropriate ministries. That same year, the CPA created the Integrity
Commission (IC) to enforce basic standards (such as financial disclosure
by public officials) and pursue corrupt officials.
Both the BSA and the IC suffered from serious limitations.19 They
had to work through the IGs, who were often unqualified, party-selected
insiders (whose own positions were poorly delineated by law) and thus
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 121
could not be relied on to seriously investigate allegations of graft. In
addition, the IC was highly vulnerable to political interference. The government
removed several IC directors (although technically parliament
is the only institution allowed to do so), and some of them have fled the
country in fear of retribution from powerful officials whom they had
attempted to investigate.
The legal framework almost invited corruption. Article 136(b) of the
legal code, a legacy of Saddam’s rule, stated that an investigative judge
could not prosecute a civil servant without the relevant minister’s approval.
This provision was not repealed by parliament until 2011, showing
how determined the partyocracy was to maintain its access to graft
through control of ministries.20 But other legal loopholes and deficiencies,
including the lack of party-financing regulations, remain and allow
corruption to flourish. The weakness of the bodies tasked with investigation
and enforcement means that those anticorruption measures that
are in place are rarely implemented.
It is no wonder that in public-opinion polls, Iraqis see corruption as
the second-biggest threat to the country. Between the summers of 2014
and 2015, despite the ISIS occupation, the percentage of Iraqis who
thought security was the top issue that the government needed to address
fell from 61 percent to 48 percent, while the share of those who saw corruption
as the main concern rose from 34 to 43 percent. By early 2016,
fully 76 percent of Iraqis perceived that corruption was getting worse,
while 82 percent (compared to 65 percent just a few months earlier)
thought that the country was moving in the wrong direction (including
68 percent of Kurds).21 This was the case despite continuing gains in the
fight against ISIS.
In 2008, the Brookings Institution published an “Index of State Weakness
in the Developing World.” It ranked 141 developing countries on
their performance in fulfilling the four core functions of statehood: providing
security, maintaining legitimate political institutions, fostering
equitable economic growth, and meeting human needs. Iraq was ranked
fourth to last, above only the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan,
and Somalia. Given the ease with which ISIS routed the Iraqi army
from major cities in 2014, the state’s capacity to provide security and to
control Iraq’s borders clearly had not improved six years later.
Today, as international attention is focused on ISIS’s control over
large swaths of Iraqi territory, it is easy to forget that nonstate actors (or
at least those beyond the effective authority of the central state) have
controlled large parts of Iraq for many years now. For instance, Iranianbacked
militias control Basrah, Iraq’s second-largest city and the center
of its oil wealth. In the autonomous Kurdistan region, the security sector
is controlled by the region’s own security force (the Peshmerga) as opposed
to national security forces.
Corruption not only undermines government capacity, it also erodes
122 Journal of Democracy
popular faith in ostensibly democratic institutions. Ordinary Iraqis have
come to see the formal state as deeply illegitimate. In thirteen years of
transition, their political leaders have done little or nothing to improve the
conditions in which Iraqis live. Evidence abounds that Iraqis do not trust
their institutions; this includes the judiciary, parliament, and government
ministries, as well as the political parties that have been the focus of this
essay. A growing number of Iraqis say that they are unlikely to vote in the
next election in 2018, reflecting popular disillusionment with the existing
political system. More troubling still, perceptions of state legitimacy vary
considerably by sect. Only 29 percent of Sunnis and 6 percent of Kurds
say that their group is treated fairly by society and the government (even
among Shia, 30 percent believe that they are not treated fairly). The vast
majority of Kurds support independence for their long-autonomous region.
Nearly half of Iraqis see their country as mostly divided, despite a
surge of national sentiment resulting from the war on ISIS.22
One of the greatest threats to Iraqi state legitimacy is the disenfranchisement
of the Sunni population, whose leaders and people were
marginalized, detained, and harassed during Maliki’s rule.23 For more
than two years, ISIS has been governing parts of Iraq where the central
government has lost all sovereignty. At the time of ISIS’s takeover of
Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, a majority of the population appeared to
support the group or at least to express indifference toward it. In other
words, large numbers of Sunnis seemed to prefer being governed by a
terrorist group such as ISIS over Maliki’s repressive and sectarian rule.
While the outside world is preoccupied with the ISIS threat, Iraqis
are focused on the rot within their own elected government, a decay that
helped to bring about ISIS and that will have to be dealt with the day
after the terror group is defeated, if not before. Years of poor governance
have left many Iraqis longing for the relative order of the Saddam regime.
Even as the international community provides military and humanitarian
support in the fight against ISIS, large numbers of Iraqis are angry at the
United States, Iran, the Gulf states, and other international actors for propping
up the corrupt, illegitimate partyocracy rather than supporting the
people and their legitimate grievances.
While as of 2015 a strong majority of Iraqis (69 percent) continue to
see democracy as the best form of government,24 a growing number of
Iraqis (many of them middle-class) have begun to profess support for a
presidential system and a strong leader to lead the country out of chaos.
A Western-educated Iraqi businessman, whose company once benefited
from U.S. military contracts, told me that he is in favor of an “Iraqi
Sisi”—a reference to Egypt’s military strongman—“to bring discipline
to the country.” Others have called for a “government of national salvation”
to rule the country on an interim basis. And nostalgia for Saddam
is ubiquitous on social media these days.
The emergence of ISIS following years of sectarian rule poses a di-
Mieczys³aw P. Boduszyñski 123
rect threat to Iraq’s survival as a unified state. Yet ISIS and sectarianism
should also be seen as symptoms of deeper illnesses in the Iraqi polity,
the same ailments that drove ordinary Iraqis to demand change in
2015–16: the corruption and ineffectiveness of the entrenched political
class, exceptionally weak state capacity, and deep popular distrust of state
institutions. Moreover, each of these maladies reinforces the other two.
The CPA certainly set in motion some policies (such as the disbanding
of the army and de-Baathification) that laid the groundwork for years of
poor governance. Decades of repression under Saddam, as well as the
oil-dependent Iraqi economy, also made the task of democratization very
challenging. Yet Iraq’s political elite need look no further than the “man
in the mirror” to find the principal source of inept and corrupt governance.
The demand for political change that began in 2015, while perhaps
delayed by the fight against ISIS, is unlikely to be reversed. As of this
writing, civic activists are debating whether to continue their protests or to
postpone them until all Iraqi territory is liberated from the terrorist group.
Alternatively, if sectarianism continues to be the legitimizing principle
for Iraqi political parties, and corruption and poor governance continue
to be the norm, the consequences will be grim. The Shia populism of
Muqtada al-Sadr would promote further polarization, new groups feeding
on Sunni marginalization might emerge, and pressures for Kurdish separatism
would most likely grow—all of which would threaten not only the
emergence of genuine democracy but the very survival of the Iraqi state.
NOTES
1. At its height, ISIS managed to occupy nearly a third of Iraq’s territory and install a
reign of terror that the European Union and United States have designated as genocide. On 3
July 2016, the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad was struck by coordinated bombings, for
which ISIS claimed responsibility, that killed more than three-hundred people and injured
hundreds more.
2. The failure of the Iraqi army to defend the city of Mosul has been directly linked to
corruption: Because there were tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers” whose salaries were
pocketed by corrupt officers, there were many fewer soldiers actually defending Mosul
than there were on the books.
3. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “A Challenging Path Toward Reconciliation:
December 2015–January 2016 Survey Findings,” NDI, 25 February 2016; see summary at
www.ndi.org/Poll_Points_Path_Forward_Iraq_Reconciliation.
4. Kanan Makiya, The Rope (New York: Pantheon, 2016), 28.
5. Zaid Al-Ali, The Struggle for Iraq’s Future: How Corruption, Incompetence, and
Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 56.
6. For a comprehensive analysis of the problems with de-Baathification, see Miranda
Sissons and Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy: Lessons of De-Baathification in
Iraq,” International Center for Transitional Justice, March 2013. See also Beth K. Dougherty,
“De-Ba’thification in Iraq: How Not to Pursue Transitional Justice,” Middle East
Institute, 30 January 2014.
124 Journal of Democracy
7. Al-Ali, Struggle for Iraq’s Future, 65.
8. Many Iraqis will readily note that sectarianism is mainly a problem between politicians,
and not between people. Zaid al-Ali observes that in his five years of working with
the United Nations in Baghdad on rule of law issues after 2003, he encountered sectarianism
mostly among parliamentarians, and not in other state institutions such as the judiciary.
See al-Ali, Struggle for Iraq’s Future, 60.
9. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “A Challenging Path Toward Reconciliation.”
10. On the negative consequences of the closed-list, single constituency electoral system
used in Iraq’s initial elections, see Adeed Dawisha and Larry Diamond, “Iraq’s Year of Voting
Dangerously,” Journal of Democracy 17 (April 2006): 89–103. The electoral law was
subsequently amended to allow for an open-list system, and multiple constituencies.
11. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “A Challenging Path Toward Reconciliation.”
12. See interview with Zaid al-Ali on al-Jazeera’s “Q&A: Iraq elections explained,”
30 April 2014. www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/04/qa-iraq-elections-explained-201442973557966208.html.
13. Al-Ali, Struggle for Iraq’s Future, 159.
14. USAID Iraq, “Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Civil Society in Iraq: A Public Opinion
Survey,” September 2015.
15. Peter Harling writes: “Iraq’s national grid is a metaphor for the country’s problems.
Access to electricity, the starting point for all modern human activity, is the last
problem you would expect in a country with plentiful hydrocarbon reserves, big rivers and
as much sunshine as the Garden of Eden. But the electricity supply illustrates the failings
and the convolutions of the political system”; see Harling, “Why Iraqis Fear Victory,” Le
Monde Diplomatique, 5 August 2016.
16. Ali Mamouri, “Iraqis Protest Corruption, Lack of Services While Politicians Blame
Everyone but Themselves,” Al Monitor, 25 August 2015. Iranian officials also criticized
the protestors.
17. Adnan Abu Zeed, “How Religious Movements Gained the Upper Hand in Iraqi
Protests,” Al-Monitor, 6 April 2016.
18. See Muqtada al-Sadr’s website, http://jawabna.com, where he made the statement
in response to a question sent by one of his followers.
19. Al-Ali, Struggle for Iraq’s Future, 197.
20. Al-Ali, Struggle for Iraq’s Future, 200.
21. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “Lack of Responsiveness Impacts Mood:
August–September 2015 Survey Findings,” NDI, 23 November 215; see summary at
https://www.ndi.org/Iraq_Survey_August_to_September_2015.
22. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “A Challenging Path Toward Reconciliation.”
23. This included the unfair application of a harsh “antiterrorism” law and continued
de-Baathification, which Iraq’s Sunnis feel targets them as a group.
24. Greenberg Quinlan Rosberg Research, “Lack of Responsiveness Impacts Mood.”