Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2020, pp. 32-33
Special Report
By Dr. Jafar Al Mudhafar
MORE THAN 400 IRAQIS have been killed since the start of anti-government protests in October. Demonstrators chanted “Iran out of Iraq!” as they burned Iran’s consulates in Karbala and Najaf. Amnesty International’s Middle East Research Director, Lynn Maalouf, accused Iraq’s security forces of committing “appalling violence against largely peaceful protesters.” On Thanksgiving Day alone, 40 protesters were killed, prompting Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi to say he would resign.
It is difficult to describe the state of deterioration that Iraqis are now living under—not that they were enjoying prosperity before 2003. Saddam Hussain’s wars with Iran, his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and his defeat by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, shattered Iraq’s chances for stability and progress. But it was the George W. Bush administration’s 2003 invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq that established a sectarian and ethnicity-based system that erased any opportunity to overcome these crises. Instead of helping Iraqis establish a secular modern country based on legal institutions that do not distinguish between its citizens on the basis of their religion, race or ethnicity, the U.S. set up a structure that helped divide it.
Iraq was founded after World War I in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and once held a distinguished place in the international community. Iraq signed the United Nations Declaration in 1943 and was among the countries that contributed to the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
During the U.S. occupation, under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Interim President of Iraq Paul Bremer oversaw the drafting of an Iraqi constitution, written mainly by representatives of Shi’i and Sunni sectarian parties and Kurdish nationalist parties. It established an Iraqi authority composed of parties that are not vested in the Iraqi identity. Instead they had a clear and dangerous history of standing against the possibility of establishing a united, thriving Iraqi nation. The new Iraqi political system now confronts an extremely dangerous situation. It should not have been difficult to foresee that the new construct would drown in its own swamp.
Rival factions—Shi’i parties that are part of an Iranian effort to dominate the region, separatist Kurdish parties, and corrupt Sunni forces—eagerly joined the new failed Iraqi state and devoured its remnants. Instead of strengthening one another to establish a country based on a secular, democratic, nationalist ideology, Iraqi factions were supported and strengthened by neighboring regional powers that had their own interests in the region. Iran eventually prevailed, gradually becoming the de facto ruler of Iraq.
General Qassim Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite paramilitary Quds Force, fostered ties with both the Shi’a-led Iraqi government and Iraq’s Shi’a militia groups, and helped to defeat ISIS in Iraq. But Iraq lost both its independence and its sovereignty after it became General Soleimani’s domain, as he sought to reach even further into Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain. General Soleimani’s political system means to divide a country, not to build it. Shi’i, Sunnis and Kurds along with the religious, sectarian and ethnic components of Iraq’s constitution have created a fragmented Iraqi nation.
As a result of a quota system, the parties in power today engage in a heated race to win the loyalties of Iraqi citizens, many of whom have to join these parties in order to obtain the basic necessities of life. Any objective observer of Iraq’s government can see how this structure cannot provide the most basic and fundamental needs for governance and society. Instead it has become an instrument to seize state institutions and distribute Iraq’s spoils among its leaders. Meanwhile, the majority of Iraqis are deprived of a legitimate livelihood and the opportunity to live a decent life.
The post-2003 Iraqi rulers have not had much success, so they continue to play the same broken record to remind everyone of the tragic regime of Saddam Hussain. ISIS spread rapidly in the absence of any new government achievements and with the escalation of corruption, all the while pushing a myth of the old state returning. In record time ISIS occupied one-third of Iraq’s territory and threatened the fall of Baghdad itself.
Small wonder after all of this that a movement has emerged and a generation of young people who did not live under Saddam Hussain is protesting, and using the slogan, “Enough is Enough.”
The new Iraqi generation has exploded with anger and disgust for the rampant corruption, and they’re hungry for reform. They believe their homeland has been kidnapped by their Iranian neighbor. They also feel they’ve lost their future in a political tragedy caused by a sectarian, rigged electoral system that ensures the same corrupt parties will return to power.
This is why the hungry, oppressed Iraqi professionals came out peacefully and unarmed to face General Soleimani, who they hold responsible for those 400 martyrs, in addition to more than 11,000 wounded Iraqis. The protesters know that the sectarian, social and economic corruption that has spread into all aspects of Iraqi life has to be destroyed to repair the structural imbalance of the foundation of this regime.
The United States, as well as the other nations that occupied Iraq and helped establish this moribund regime, have a moral responsibility to assist this peaceful Iraqi revolution in its quest to fend off the kidnappers and recover Iraq.
Dr. Jafar Al Mudhafar grew up in Basra and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Baghdad, in 1969 and studied at the University of New York at Buffalo in 1976. He was a professor at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Baghdad, until 2006, when he retired and moved to Virginia.
