Senior Fellow of the Next Century Foundation, Neil Partrick, is currently working on a book entitled State Functionality in the Middle East and North Africa. It will examine how power and sovereignty is exercised in six Arab majority states, and how each of these states function in the context of complex and unstable political dynamics. As part of this process, he has written a paper on Iraq, entitled ‘Iraq: A Functioning or a Failing State?’. READ THE FULL PAPER HERE.
The Paper’s Conclusions
Iraq remains a struggling state, and there is little that can coalesce to make it a more coherent, functioning entity. The formation of a new government (delayed since the October 2021 elections) would make muhasasa operate more smoothly, not that it isn’t functioning in the absence of a formal government. Ministerial post-holders – whether caretakers or not – utilise their position to serve their interests and that of their faction and its popular base. The assumed inclusion of all significant political factions, from across the main ethno-sectarian groups, in a new government, presumably without the Sadrists, would enable business as usual. For this to be remotely stable though the Sadrists would need to be accommodated by means other than the parliamentary road to patronage that they departed from. Perhaps budgets in the hands of non-elected Sadrist officials in ministries or via the Baghdad and Basra governorates would do it. If the Sadrists are not accommodated in a new ‘national government’, then Sadr, who wanted to end the politics of the militia, will increasingly publicly assert his own militia’s strength on the street. Another ‘Battle of the Knights’, like the last Maliki-Sadr face-off, will beckon.
Sadr’s attempted Tripartite Alliance government with a Sunni Arab alignment and the leading Kurdish faction, reflected a perceptible weakening of Iranian influence in Iraq, even though Nouri Al-Maliki allegedly privately accused Iran of having supported Sadr’s past ambitions. The Sadrists believe Iran (and its ‘High Commissioner’, the IRGC Qods Force chief Esmail Qani) has encouraged Maliki to propose an anti-Sadrist PM. This rhetorical spinning aside, the reassertion of the ‘national’ government option by Maliki and his Shia allies reflects the fact that this Shia political plurality were never going to surrender power easily, and that they knew they could count on discreet Iranian backing, even if Tehran is not the player in Iraq it was under Qassim Suleimani. In this context a continued Kadhemi premiership could be the preference of the Iraqi Shia political plurality, the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, and Iran. Kadhemi, after all, has no political base, enjoys good relations with the ‘enemy’ (the US), and is unable to seriously restructure the Hashed Al-Sha’abi. The leading Hashed militias may not be Iranian tools, but they are not an Iraqi nationalist enemy of Iran either. Then there is the dreaded option of another election. In which case we will have entered Groundhog Day in Iraq.
As long as the rhetoric of militia reconstruction does little to alter the Hashed’s shadow role as the armed wing of leading Shia political forces, whether Maliki’s Da’wa, Hadi Al-Amri’s Badr, Qais Khazali’s Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, and others of an even more overt wilaya hue, then Iran will be content and Iraqi sovereignty will remain an oxymoron. The US will seek to persuade whomever the nominal Iraqi ‘Commander-in-Chief’ is, that loosening the Iranian lines of political and militia influence is an important part of a wider regional realignment in which pre-eminent Sunni Arab-led states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt (together with Jordan), are hoping to include Iraq. Iraq will probably be a member of any Arab club that is going, as long as Israel isn’t visibly present. Iraq’s foreign minister will sit in any fora that may encourage Baghdad’s ‘normalisation’ with Iraq’s former Arab brethren. That foreign minister is and will be a cypher for the wider internal and regional Iraqi status quo in which Baghdad isn’t master of its own house.
In the north, Baghdad will contest with Irbil for Kirkuk and the control of oil (court decisions do not affect practise, it seems). However, the Baghdad Government will let other Iraqis fight Turkey as the latter constrains ‘foreign’ Kurds in Iraq and makes a nonsense of either Iraqi or would-be (Iraqi) Kurdish sovereignty. As Turkey bombs parts of the Iraqi north, so too does Iran assault Iraqi territory indirectly, or in recent months even directly. Unusually, Iran admitted in March 2022 to bombing what it said was a ‘Zionist’ (Israeli) target in the KRG capital Irbil. However, this was equally likely to have been an Iranian-attempted but unsuccessful coercion of the KDP over its (since failed) participation in a three-way Sadrist-led majority government, and resentment at the presence of Iranian Kurdish militia. The US’ reconfigured military role inside Iraq remains contested and controversial, even though many Iraqi factions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd) do not wish the US’ infringement of Iraqi sovereignty to end just yet.
Outside of the machinations of formal executive power, sub-state identities, and to extent para-state identities, look set to run counter to state coherence and strength. A state that does not function properly always enables default space for identities and social formations for popular support and even some political weight. This remains the case among Sunni Arabs even as ‘tribe’ is neither the state-incorporated construct nor the intermediate force it once was in Iraq. Among the Shia, tribe is likewise a platform for social and political support and, for Hashed Al-Sha’abi militia especially, influence.
Iraq’s regional and international ‘allies’ continue to make a nonsense of Iraqi statehood, often assisted by Iraqi clients pursuing sub-state interests concomitant with those of their external sponsors. A truly national government, whose component parts are not calculating their political decisions based on sub and/or para-state interests, remains illusive in Iraq, if it ever existed. Iraqi state functionality does exist, but in sovereign security or economic terms it is often by accident rather than design.
Sovereign authority isn’t lent to the Iraqi state by Iraqi citizens equally capable of withdrawing this consent. Sovereignty in Iraq is a painfully negotiated compromise between powerful armed political groups asserting state writ when that fits with their own sectional interests, and equally withdrawing approval for state action if that does not accord with factional considerations. The literal security of the state and thus of the citizenry is determined or directly undermined by competing state, sub-state, para-state and even anti-state actors. Iraqi state sovereignty is an awkward by-product of armed groups, not the supposed outcome of popular sovereign will.
