Ten years after the American/coalition 'liberation' of Iraq, Baghdad has not benefitted from the building of a single school, the paving of a single kilometre of new road or the construction of any new infrastructure.
Home to 25 per cent of the population, the capital is still suffering bombings on a regular basis as the country suffers increasingly from societal fractures along confessional and sectarian lines.
The human cost of the war is still being paid, with 133 civilian deaths in the first ten days of April alone. Apart from the coalition deaths and injuries, anywhere between 170,000 and one million Iraqis died in the conflict.
Today, as Iraqis look out over a country that was at least unified under Saddam Hussein, Sunni-Sunni tensions and Shia-Shia tensions predominate, not to mention the historic antipathy between the two strands of Islam and the increasing likelihood that the Kurdish region will go its own way. And if the Kurds do break away, the whole confessional make-up of the country will change €" currently Shias make up about 60 per cent of the population but if the Kurds left that would jump to 80 per cent, a hugely destabilizing development.
'In any Western democracy no government that had the record of the Dawa Party, which has been in power since 2005, would have the audacity to stand for re-election,' Dr Kamal Field al-Basri told a Chatham House seminar marking the anniversary. 'You can talk about getting the American troops out of Iraq, that's fine, but I'm talking about real things that matter to people on the ground. We have the highest unemployment in the Middle East and, if you count in the number of people who work for the government, 50 per cent of them are ghost workers.' The public sector, meanwhile, doubled in size between 2005 and 2011 while the private sector remains negligible by comparison.
And if that analysis were not depressing enough, Iraq competes with Afghanistan for its place in the worst five per cent of the world's most corrupt nations.
And an even more telling measure of the record of the past ten years is the fact that there are now more Iraqis in the diaspora than there were at the time of the invasion and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.
But perhaps as disturbing is the replication of the centralization of authority that marked Saddam's rule €" power is increasingly concentrated in the office of the Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is even in the habit of moving army units around the country without the military's consent €" in a nation that cries out for an effectively functioning federal system. Most notoriously in late March he sent a force that included helicopters to Western Iraq to arrest Rafi Issawi, a former finance minister, and a leading member of the Sunni opposition in parliament. Fortunately Issawi's clansmen got him out of the way and no clashes took place, otherwise it could have been the spark for civil war, so tense is the atmosphere in the west. That followed his accusations of terrorism against vice-president Tariq Hashimi, another leading Sunni figure, who was condemned to death in absentia and forced to flee the country in 2011. The evidence against him came from his bodyguards, one of whom died during the investigation.
General David Petraeus' 20,000-troop strong surge €" billed by the Americans as a war-winning strategy at the time €" may have indeed got Washington out with a lighter body count than might have otherwise been the case but the political promises he made have only served to heighten inter-ethnic and inter-confessional tensions in the Iraq he left behind.
He got the Sunnis on side by getting them to buy into the political process and promising they would be re-integrated into the security forces. These political bargains were not in reality endorsed by prime minister Maliki and he has not carried through on those commitments. So the Sunnis have been left feeling disenfranchised, not least because, despite two elections, they have no real say in Baghdad. Hence the increasing protests in the Sunni-dominated provinces that are taking their cue from the Arab Spring. No wonder that expert Iraqi observers say that the country has no shared vision of itself or, as one senior Iraqi politician put it: 'It's like trying to play football with 28 players and the rules have not been developed yet. Everybody agrees on power sharing but they disagree on the amount.'
Even the establishment of the rule of law, so essential to the development of democracy and a strong economy, remains beyond the grasp of the politicians who are capturing the courts to pursue their own political interests. The constitution, rushed through by the British and Americans, is now being lamented by those it was meant to benefit. It states that the courts will be independent and they will be regulated by law. But who manages that law-making process €" the government. So it means that the courts are effectively under government control.
The constitution was drawn up with a fortress-like mentality in mind, so each region is constituted as a fortress to protect its own people from the rest of the country. 'That's the reality,' said an Iraqi expert. 'You're not talking about a country any more, you're talking about separate entities. They may nominally be part of a central state but it's a fiction.'
But surely Iraq's oil wealth will come to the rescue? Well not really, if the experts are to be believed. The economy has performed moderately well, with gross domestic product doubling since 2003, low inflation and controllable debt.
But resource curse rears its ugly head when you start to examine the oil sector. The country stands to earn $5 trillion from black gold up to 2035. But the domination of the oil sector in the economy is already a problem and likely to be a growing one. Last year oil made up 74 per cent of GDP and more than 94 per cent of government revenue, though the sector employs two per cent of the work force or 125,000 people. A recent survey showed that a typical Iraqi civil servant spent just 17 minutes a day doing productive work. That means that there are a lot of people producing a relatively small amount of output. As a result, 70 per cent of the annual budget goes to current spending or the payment of salaries. Thus the government takes on the role of job creator and because government jobs are relatively lucrative, the private sector is priced out of the jobs market €" a vicious circle. The extended problem being that between now and 2035, Iraq needs to create 500,000 new jobs a year just to absorb the new entrants into the jobs market.
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Home to 25 per cent of the population, the capital is still suffering bombings on a regular basis as the country suffers increasingly from societal fractures along confessional and sectarian lines.
The human cost of the war is still being paid, with 133 civilian deaths in the first ten days of April alone. Apart from the coalition deaths and injuries, anywhere between 170,000 and one million Iraqis died in the conflict.
Today, as Iraqis look out over a country that was at least unified under Saddam Hussein, Sunni-Sunni tensions and Shia-Shia tensions predominate, not to mention the historic antipathy between the two strands of Islam and the increasing likelihood that the Kurdish region will go its own way. And if the Kurds do break away, the whole confessional make-up of the country will change €" currently Shias make up about 60 per cent of the population but if the Kurds left that would jump to 80 per cent, a hugely destabilizing development.
'In any Western democracy no government that had the record of the Dawa Party, which has been in power since 2005, would have the audacity to stand for re-election,' Dr Kamal Field al-Basri told a Chatham House seminar marking the anniversary. 'You can talk about getting the American troops out of Iraq, that's fine, but I'm talking about real things that matter to people on the ground. We have the highest unemployment in the Middle East and, if you count in the number of people who work for the government, 50 per cent of them are ghost workers.' The public sector, meanwhile, doubled in size between 2005 and 2011 while the private sector remains negligible by comparison.
And if that analysis were not depressing enough, Iraq competes with Afghanistan for its place in the worst five per cent of the world's most corrupt nations.
And an even more telling measure of the record of the past ten years is the fact that there are now more Iraqis in the diaspora than there were at the time of the invasion and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.
But perhaps as disturbing is the replication of the centralization of authority that marked Saddam's rule €" power is increasingly concentrated in the office of the Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is even in the habit of moving army units around the country without the military's consent €" in a nation that cries out for an effectively functioning federal system. Most notoriously in late March he sent a force that included helicopters to Western Iraq to arrest Rafi Issawi, a former finance minister, and a leading member of the Sunni opposition in parliament. Fortunately Issawi's clansmen got him out of the way and no clashes took place, otherwise it could have been the spark for civil war, so tense is the atmosphere in the west. That followed his accusations of terrorism against vice-president Tariq Hashimi, another leading Sunni figure, who was condemned to death in absentia and forced to flee the country in 2011. The evidence against him came from his bodyguards, one of whom died during the investigation.
General David Petraeus' 20,000-troop strong surge €" billed by the Americans as a war-winning strategy at the time €" may have indeed got Washington out with a lighter body count than might have otherwise been the case but the political promises he made have only served to heighten inter-ethnic and inter-confessional tensions in the Iraq he left behind.
He got the Sunnis on side by getting them to buy into the political process and promising they would be re-integrated into the security forces. These political bargains were not in reality endorsed by prime minister Maliki and he has not carried through on those commitments. So the Sunnis have been left feeling disenfranchised, not least because, despite two elections, they have no real say in Baghdad. Hence the increasing protests in the Sunni-dominated provinces that are taking their cue from the Arab Spring. No wonder that expert Iraqi observers say that the country has no shared vision of itself or, as one senior Iraqi politician put it: 'It's like trying to play football with 28 players and the rules have not been developed yet. Everybody agrees on power sharing but they disagree on the amount.'
Even the establishment of the rule of law, so essential to the development of democracy and a strong economy, remains beyond the grasp of the politicians who are capturing the courts to pursue their own political interests. The constitution, rushed through by the British and Americans, is now being lamented by those it was meant to benefit. It states that the courts will be independent and they will be regulated by law. But who manages that law-making process €" the government. So it means that the courts are effectively under government control.
The constitution was drawn up with a fortress-like mentality in mind, so each region is constituted as a fortress to protect its own people from the rest of the country. 'That's the reality,' said an Iraqi expert. 'You're not talking about a country any more, you're talking about separate entities. They may nominally be part of a central state but it's a fiction.'
But surely Iraq's oil wealth will come to the rescue? Well not really, if the experts are to be believed. The economy has performed moderately well, with gross domestic product doubling since 2003, low inflation and controllable debt.
But resource curse rears its ugly head when you start to examine the oil sector. The country stands to earn $5 trillion from black gold up to 2035. But the domination of the oil sector in the economy is already a problem and likely to be a growing one. Last year oil made up 74 per cent of GDP and more than 94 per cent of government revenue, though the sector employs two per cent of the work force or 125,000 people. A recent survey showed that a typical Iraqi civil servant spent just 17 minutes a day doing productive work. That means that there are a lot of people producing a relatively small amount of output. As a result, 70 per cent of the annual budget goes to current spending or the payment of salaries. Thus the government takes on the role of job creator and because government jobs are relatively lucrative, the private sector is priced out of the jobs market €" a vicious circle. The extended problem being that between now and 2035, Iraq needs to create 500,000 new jobs a year just to absorb the new entrants into the jobs market.
news magazine
social affairs
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