Loading ...Art, business and hope are alive and well in the Iraq we don't see
BAGHDAD, IRAQ — Fewer women are wearing the veil. Many men have replaced their Islamic beards with elegant suits. Girls who had dropped out of school for fear of terrorist and sectarian attacks are preparing to resume their education when the academic year starts next month.
The city is full of cars, including some flashy ones, and luxury shops are mushrooming everywhere as people insist they wish to live their lives “to the full.”
There are concerts and fashion shows, even political satires.
Sipping tea in a café Mutanabbi Street, in the historic quarter, a conversation with friends is briefly interrupted by a few dozen people carrying posters of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Almost no one pays attention.
“That, too, is part of life,” says Abu-Hussein, our driver. “Demonstrations, bomb blasts, news of atrocities; but life goes on.”
For more than a decade, a four-letter word has haunted foreign-policy debate in the United States: Iraq.
President Obama built a political career around it, using it as a code word for all that is wrong with the projection of American power in an increasingly complex world.
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A model presents a creation by Iraqi designer Waffa Al-Shathar during a fashion show at the Hunting Club in Baghdad on August 13.
Photo: Reuters
During the decade of active US engagement in Iraq an estimated 1.5 million Americans, both military and civilian, served there. More than 4,400 gave their lives to liberate Iraq and help it resist post-liberation attacks by terrorists.
Reaction to the war was so polarized that it has prevented a proper assessment of Iraq today.
Those who regard the toppling of Saddam Hussein as a secular version of the original sin are not prepared to hear of Iraq as anything but total disaster. In contrast, some who supported the war refuse to admit that it has failed to achieve many of the goals set in the spring of 2003.
What if Iraq today is neither the “total disaster” that Obama claims nor the beacon of Arab democracy that George W. Bush promised?
Life goes on in Iraq — not as peaceful and prosperous as one would hope, but better than it was during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
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Iraqis look at books outside a bookshop in central Baghdad on August 7.
Photo: Getty Images
Arab upheaval
One thing to consider is Iraq’s position in the context of its geopolitical habitat at this particular moment in history.
Iraq is a member of the Arab League, a grouping of 22 nations in Africa and the Middle East. Among them, warts and all, Iraq is in a better position than the average.
Four of the member are failed states: Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Twelve have suffered frequent terrorist attacks over past decade: Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates.
Three have gone through one or more civil wars: Sudan, Yemen and Syria. One, Sudan, has been divided into two states. Another, Libya, is divided by three governments.
Only two Arab League nations, Oman and Qatar, both with small populations, have been relatively peaceful in the past decade.
Even the tragic loss of life in the country is, unfortunately, not an aberration during this bloody period in Middle East history.
According to Iraq Body Count, 219,000 Iraqis lost their lives in the war and the post-liberation period.
The Algerian civil war of the 1990s claimed more than 400,000 lives, according to President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika. According to UN estimates, the Syrian civil war has already claimed almost 240,000 lives. The North-South Yemeni civil war of the 1990s claimed some 100,000 lives while the Sudanese civil war, covering a longer period, might have claimed over a million lives and still continues in three smaller versions. The post-coup violence in Egypt has already claimed 40,000 lives in just 15 months.
In other words, as far as violence is concerned Iraq is not doing any worse, and may be is doing slightly better, than most League members.
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Iraqis watch the news on TV at a cafe in Baghdad on August 11.
Photo: Getty Images
Promising signs
For the first time since the 1960s, Iraq is not among the top exporters of refugees from the Arab League, with Somalia, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Syria filling the top slots. In the past two years, an estimated 600,000 Iraqis have been driven out of their homes as a result of incursions by ISIS. But they have not fled to other countries, preferring to find safe havens inside Iraq itself.
Iraq is also doing better in economic terms.
Its annual growth rate of 4.5% is double that of the average for the Arab League. It also runs the only budget with a structural surplus. Part of that is due to immense oil wealth, which, recent price falls notwithstanding, pumps cash into the coffers.
However, oil alone does not explain all.
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Iraqi kids jump into the Euphrates river in Kufa, near the holy city of Najaf, on May 29.
Photo: Getty Images
Iran, not an Arab nation but also a major oil exporter, has difficulty paying civil servants regularly. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is shopping around to borrow $17 billion to cope with its cash-flow problem. The Iraqi dinar remains the strongest of the oil currencies in the Persian Gulf.
A visitor to the “holy” cities of Najaf and Karbala and, on a smaller scale, the great southern port of Basra would be impressed by the construction boom there with real-estate prices rocketing in many cases.
Iraq has 18 provinces of which three, where Sunni Muslims form a majority, remain threatened by ISIS, which also controls the nation’s third-most-populous city, Mosul. In the three Kurdish-majority provinces a decade-long economic boom is tapering off, largely because of the decision by Baghdad to limit the scope of their autonomy. But even there, the overall economic picture is less gloomy than in most other Arab states.
There are no reliable official statistics, but anecdotal evidence and observations on the ground reveal a steady increase in foreign investment, mostly from Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and Dubai. In Baghdad circles the speculation is that some Turkish companies who had to leave Syria have transferred part of their activities to Iraq.
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Actors perform in a new political comedy being staged at the National Theater in Baghdad on August 8.
Photo: Reuters
Freedom to mock
Disastrous images notwithstanding, Iraq is also attracting more foreign visitors, albeit mostly pilgrims, than traditional Arab tourist destinations such as Egypt and Tunisia. This year, the number of Iranian visitors to Iraq alone is set to top 2.5 million.
In Baghdad itself the economic picture is less bright than two years ago, reflecting the shadow cast by the fall of Mosul and Ramadi.
Nevertheless, even Baghdad looks brighter and more bustling than the average Arab League capital struck by global recession and despotic rule.
Iraq is doing better, or less badly, in other areas as well.
Its people enjoy a degree of political freedom that other Arab nations and neighboring Iran could only dream of.
All political parties, from Communist to monarchist, are legal and active and often represented in the parliament.
Iraq also has privately-owned media outlets, a privilege shared by only four other Arab League members.
Unlike other Arab League states or Iran where criticism of the “Big Cheese” could land you in jail or worse, lampooning top leaders is a national sport in Iraq.
Earlier this month, at a time that Egypt was banning public gatherings of more than five people, Iraqis were organizing mass demonstrations in 21 cities, including Baghdad, against Prime Minister Heydar al-Abadi’s government, forcing him to come out with a new package of reforms to curb corruption and slim down the bureaucracy.
Like most Arabs, many Iraqis still live in fear; but this is a fear of Islamic terrorists, not of their own government. The reason is that the toppling of Saddam led to the smashing of the machinery of repression around which modern Arab states were built after the First World War.
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On July 10, Muslims arrive at the shrine of Shiite Imam Ali in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf for prayers during Lailat al-Qadr (Night of Power) which marks the night in which the holy Koran was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.
Photo: Getty Images)
Continued corruption
Iraq stands out for other reasons.
It is the only Arab nation so far to have changed government five times through elections and not through military coups, civil wars or assassinations. Having talked to scores of Iraqis, one gets the impression that they have developed a consensus that governments should be changed only through elections.
This may sound bland to people in well-established democracies. In the Arab World, it is a truly revolutionary phenomenon.
The story of Iraq today has its dark side, corruption to start with.
It is on such a scale that it, in the words of journalist Salah Jameel, should be considered “a way of life not an aberration.”
Because the state still controls the nation’s oil revenues, it is seen by many as the golden goose. Thus, Iraq has more ministers, deputy ministers and assistant ministers than the Soviet Union had in its heyday. Each minister, in turn, has countless deputies, advisers and consultants. At a dinner in Baghdad earlier this month a senior minister was surprised to learn that one of the guests was his “special advisor” without him knowing it.
There are, of course, some who see corruption as a mechanism for distribution, much like the classical pork-barrel politics practiced in the United States.
“We are a tribal society,” says businessman Ali Hadhbawi. “We expect anyone in a position to look after his group. When you have a lucrative post you will end up with a huge entourage of clansmen and admirers. You have to feed them.”
He argues that the current corruption has “the advantage of being democratized” as compared to Saddam era when a small coterie rode the gravy train.
“Our corruption is more like the welfare benefits and tax cuts that Western politicians use to bribe their electorates,” he quips.
Talking to other Iraqis, however, one hears a more sinister explanation.
“This is no longer corruption,” says another businessman who doesn’t want his name mentioned. “This is plunder prompted by psychological desperation. Many in the governing elite have no confidence in the future of Iraq. So, they want to get rich while the party lasts. They have an after-me-the-deluge mentality.”
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Photo: AP
Abandoned by Obama
Another dark side relates to growing sectarianism.
From its start in the 1920s, Iraq was the least sectarian of Arab states if only because it was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith place with Arabs, Kurds, Faylis, Jews, Armenians, Sabaeans and Persians. Even under Saddam, Baghdad was not divided across sectarian lines.
Today, it is divided into three sections; Sunnis, Shiites and mixed, a situation that reminds one of places like Belfast.
“All hope is vested in the non-sectarian third of Baghdad,” says novelist Loay Abdul-Ilah. “The heart of that segment is the Mutunabbi Street, only 300 meters where bookshops, intellectual cafes and theaters are located. There, no one cares about your sect; people talk of film festivals, fashion shows, plays, poetry recitals, concerts, new novels and the latest stars of Arab music.”
Seen by many Iraqis as a betrayal, President Obama’s decision to abandon Iraq created a vacuum that Iranian mullahs and their mirror image, the ISIS throat-cutters, are trying to fill.
My guess is that Iraq will succeed in overcoming its miseries but at a higher cost than it would have had to pay had Obama not left them in a lurch.
However, Obama was not thinking of Iraq but of his career; he had to prove that Iraq was a disaster and, if that didn’t happen, make sure that it became a disaster. For more than a year he even refused to name an ambassador to Baghdad, making it clear he didn’t wish to hear the four-letter word.
Even today, rather than helping Iraq destroy ISIS, Obama and his entourage pay hide-and-seek with a struggle that could reshape the entire Middle East.
It may well be wishful thinking, but standing under a blazing sun this summer, a visitor has the sensation that Iraq will end up confounding those who wrote it off as a disaster or worked to make it one.
History may yet show that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a blessing and that the US is owed a debt of gratitude for that.
Source: nypost.com