Death Knell of the Iraqi Democratic State—Premature? We Hope So
By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer
A recent, dire report has emerged that questions Iraq’s continuation as a democracy. The origin of the report derives from one Iraqi’s perceptions based on a series of catastrophes surrounding the failure of several health facilities. Meanwhile, as if Iraq had not been hit hard enough by Covid-19, it had already been reeling from several broad, deep-lying structural problems. Its economic, political, social and health, and environmental and security status had already placed Iraq in the category of a fragile state. Now, according to some sources, a new surge of Covid-19 may have pushed Iraq from the fragile state category to the cusp of a failed state.
Recent Assessment of Iraq’s Political Condition shows Country at Extreme Risk
In an article titled “A Eulogy for Iraq’s Democracy,” the Middle East Institute’s (MEI) Yesar Al-Maleki felt compelled to release a dire report on the future of Iraq’s fragile state of democracy. What propelled this response was a recent series of catastrophes surrounding the failure of several health facilities. Al-Maleki noted that the exact trigger of his feelings was a scene of “charred bodies being pulled out from what remained of a burned-out coronavirus isolation in Nassiriya.” He initially associated this tragedy with “a eulogy for those lost to Iraq’s stubborn corruption and chronic mismanagement, but it has since become a eulogy for democracy in Iraq.”
The tragedy left 92 dead, blamed on the explosion of an oxygen tank. A similar event had occurred a few months earlier at a Baghdad hospital, killing 82 patients. Mid-management was blamed for that incident and resulted in a sham resignation of the Iraqi health minister. Al-Maleki saw these events as the collapse of Iraq’s health care system, once praised for its high standards. Many patients were forced to seek treatment in Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran. Some former patients equated the country’s hospitals with “mass graves.” Several other similar incidents have all snowballed into angry feelings nationwide.
Al-Maleki linked calls for revolution in the south of Iraq, using appeals to the revered hero Ali and the victimhood historically connected to a central tenet of the Shi’a sect of Islam. In this context, feelings of grief over the assassination of Hussein in Karbala in 680 CE may spill over to public anger over contemporary grievances. A continued conflict between Iraq’s Shias, a dysfunction in the provision of basic government services, and the government’s lack of preparation for the coming post-oil economy globe, could add up to catastrophe.
This possibility and the failure of the government over the past couple of decades in meeting public needs, while at the same time lining the pockets of elected officials, have led to a growing distrust in the role of democracy across the country.
Covid-19 contributed significantly to Iraq’s present fragility–Now there’s the Delta Variant
As if Iraq had not been hit hard enough by Covid-19, it had already been reeling from several broad, deep-lying structural problems. Its economic, political, social and health, and environmental and security status already placed Iraq in the category of a fragile state. In another MEI article, it was reported that the country was already confronting “a set of acute challenges that the country was ill-prepared to manage.” Even before the pandemic struck Iraq was facing issues which the World Bank had argued that “Iraq exhibited the hallmarks of a failed state, not merely a fragile one.”
This World Bank report went as far as to say, as of September 2020, that “Iraq is on the brink of catastrophe. Almost two decades after the Iraq war began, the country remains caught in a fragility trap and faces increasing political instability and fragmentation, geopolitical risks, growing social unrest, and a deepening divide between the state and its citizens.” And, while the government took some prevention steps to deal with the pandemic, the Covid rate of infection skyrocketed, alongside job loss, price hikes, and poverty rate increases. Women, children and the forcibly displaced have been especially hard smacked by the health and economic blows of Covid-19.
Covid-19 has pushed Iraq over into the fragile state category, if not to the cusp of a failed state. Covid not only cause disruptions of the public health system but has cascading effects on the rest of the economy. Fragility implies the absence of the will and/or capacity of a state to fulfill basic needs of its population. According to the MEI article, a tool known as the Fragile States Index has been developed to measure “a state’s vulnerability to conflict or collapse. Iraq’s score on this tool rose after the defeat of DAESH/ISIS, especially on the security axis. But on the measures of risk exposure and limited state exposure,” the country ranks among one of the most fragile states.
The conclusion of the 2020 World Bank report is dismal by itself, and alongside the current reporting of Al-Maleki, it adds up to catastrophe. The 2020 report stated, “Few countries are as well-endowed as Iraq in human and natural resource wealth-generating potential. Yet, there are fewer countries still which have experienced the carnage and devastation that Iraq has over the past three decades. For the latter reason and others, Iraq entered the COVID era with markedly high exposure to, and a limited capacity to address the public health and second-order effects of the pandemic.”
This assessment suggests for Iraq a long haul out of the pandemic, for which we’ve not even begun to estimate the potentially negative impacts of the Delta variant of Covid. The failure of the government to manage even its own problems, much less those of its citizens, spells a possibly disastrous future for its hard-earned democracy. Whether Iraq manages to simply remain a fragile state or becomes a failed state remains to be seen. Perhaps, given these dismal alternatives, any discussion of democracy is a luxury.
Sources:
“A Eulogy for Iraq’s Democracy,” Yesar Al-Maleki, Middle East Institute, 7/20/2021
“Iraq’s fragile state in the time of Covid-19,” Middle East Institute, 12/8/2020
John Mason, PhD., who focuses on Arab culture, society, and history, is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017. He did fieldwork in an east Libyan Saharan oasis and has taught at the University of Libya-Benghazi, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo. John served with the United Nations as an advisor in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID, the UN, and the World Bank in 65 countries.
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