US President Donald Trump exposed the deep crisis of governance in Iraq with a tweet that threatened the future of the political system and paralyzed the towering figures of Iraqi politics.
These partisan elites emerged, under exceptional conditions, as a result of the intersecting interests of the American occupiers and these parties’ Iranian patrons. The consensus they developed created robust political blocs that jointly worked together to develop a regime that served all of their interests. Over time, they turned into oligarchic forces whose legitimacy is underpinned by a nominally democratic process. As they vied to consolidate their power, most of these parties drew on their historic victimization as former opposition movements to push a religious discourse around their ethnic or doctrinal identity.
Their ideological and oligarchic bent has left these party elites captive of their recent past and troubled present. They failed to produce a modern, forward-looking discourse, and after two decades in power, they seem to be aging prematurely. They have developed neither a governance framework nor a sustainable political project, paralyzing politics, especially at the elite level.
In today’s Iraq, especially after Trump’s post and the leadership’s failure to contain the fallout, Washington and Baghdad’s relationship is fundamentally different from what it had been in 2003. One key difference is the absence of an Iraqi political actor who can effectively influence US decision-makers or build a persuasive Iraqi narrative, playing the role that the late Ahmed Chalabi had at critical junctures in the past.
The 2003 regime has also failed to produce a political or intellectual elite committed to upholding the national interest. This elite did not have to be partisan, and it could have played a role similar to that of Iraqi thinkers and academics in exile, particularly in Washington. Kanan Makiya, for example, had the mind of a mediator and helped put Iraq on the international agenda through his clout among intellectuals and political decision-makers in Washington.
The current crisis of the political elite is not new. It is the result of the elite’s perverse early development, which has taken it on a trajectory that embodies the “iron law of oligarchy” theorized by the early twentieth-century German-Italian sociologist Robert Michels. He believed that political organizations, even those claiming to be democratic, eventually concentrate power in the hands of a small minority. The pillars of the 2003 regime seem to have perfectly applied this theory of Michels, who would ironically go on to align himself with Mussolini’s fascist regime.
This is not Iraq’s first crisis of governance, though it might be its most perilous. In 2019, the “October uprising” forced the 2003 regime to appoint an outsider prime minister. Mustafa al-Kadhimi was aware of the complexity of the crisis when he took office, and he understood both the political and elite failures. He avoided direct confrontation and sought, instead, to work with non-partisan and non-ideological political and academic elites. For the ruling class, these figures represented an existential threat and were not allowed to gain real power.
A second deadlock emerged during the penultimate Iraqi parliamentary elections, which were held when Kadhimi was in power. The ideological voter chose to support the State of Law coalition led by Nouri al-Maliki over other ideological or factional parties - a choice that could be interpreted as a preference for the state over sub-state forces.
Hisham Dawood, an Iraqi academic at the French National Institute who played an academic-political role in Kadhimi’s government, has offered a clear-eyed characterization of the: both the partisan elites who arrived in 2003 and those who emerged afterward, with their political discourse and paramilitary factions and militias, have so far failed to transform into a founding civil structure. They remain prisoners of their initial frame of mind.
In Washington, no one listens to the old Iraqi narrative. In Baghdad, no one can present a new narrative that is convincing to Washington, which has shifted to a unilateral regional policy. Accordingly, the survival of the current system of governance seems impossible.
