Why Iraqi Democracy Never Stood a Chance

Twenty years ago this month, the United States and a handful of allies invaded Iraq, promising to unseat the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein and build a new, flourishing democracy. They succeeded in quickly bringing down Saddam, but conjuring a democratic Iraq proved to be much more difficult. Instead, what emerged after 2003 was a political system grounded in corruption, self-dealing, and brutal oppression at times reminiscent of the violence of the previous regime.

On paper, Iraq in the last 20 years has looked like democracy, staging five national elections and seeing five largely peaceful handovers of power between different political parties and prime ministers. But the government has failed at a more fundamental level. It has been unable to provide basic services to citizens, instead enshrining a system of corruption that benefits a small elite who have prospered no matter who is the prime minister. Iraqis have grown disillusioned. Each election has seen lower turnout, with voter participation plummeting to a record low of 41 percent in the 2021 parliamentary elections. That government figure may be rather inflated; several officials told me that the true percentage of turnout was in the 20s.

This system has faced serious challenges from groups that have felt excluded: the uprising led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has since become a key part of Iraq’s establishment; the rise of the brutal Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in 2014 in response to the government’s exclusion of Sunnis; and the Tishreen protest movement in 2019, when young Iraqis took to the streets decrying the dire state of basic services and rejecting the governing system. This last challenge inspired not compromise but repression, as authorities killed hundreds and wounded tens of thousands of protesters. Iraq’s ruling elite came to power after the U.S. invasion with the promise of building a democracy; now they meet public discontent with unstinting violence.

The ills of this system are often attributed to haste and poor preparation as the United States turned from invader to occupier, under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Infamously, in 2003, the CPA disbanded the Iraqi military, taking livelihoods away from men with guns and creating a security vacuum in cities and border crossings. The CPA’s decision to purge members of Saddam’s Baath Party led to the firing of over 40,000 senior members of the country’s civil service. These were errors, many have argued, that guaranteed violence, chaos, and the evisceration of the Iraqi state. If only these decisions could have been reversed, Iraq would be on a different trajectory today. 

But in truth, the blunders of the CPA were guided by a plan that was years in the making. A decade before the invasion, the United States worked with and funded a group of Iraqi exiles who met several times to imagine a post-Saddam Iraq. In those meetings, they began devising a system that would not just replace the old order but guarantee their power. This system now rules Iraq. It has inflamed sectarian divisions, entrenched corruption, and squashed dissent, all while safeguarding the interests of the political elites who rushed to fill the void left by the dictator. But this system cannot and will not bring meaningful democracy to the country, simply because it was not designed to do so.

FRACTURING IRAQI SOCIETY

During the 1990s, the United States backed and partnered with the group of Iraqi exiles, who came mostly from Kurdish nationalist and Shiite Islamist political parties, and a handful of secular groups. They had endured particularly stringent persecution under Saddam. Over the course of their meetings in the United States, Europe, and Kurdish safe havens in northern Iraq, they traced the contours of the future Iraqi state.

Their moment arrived during the scramble that followed the toppling of Saddam. In July 2003, the CPA set up the Iraqi Governing Council, a body tasked with administering Iraq until a new system of government was in place. This council was made up primarily of returning Iraqi exiles—only a few of its 25 members lived in Baghdad before the war—who hastily pushed for the drafting of a constitution and the staging of elections. They wanted to prove that Iraq after Saddam was already a fledgling democracy. But the window dressing of new legal codes and electoral procedures sought to obscure a reality that was far from democratic.

Returning to Baghdad after decades abroad, Iraq’s exiles faced a legitimacy problem. How could they speak on behalf of Iraqis when they had been away from the country for so many years? Their answer was to craft a political system based on identity that would allow them to secure their own constituencies and consolidate power. During their years in exile, they had already envisioned that the political system of post-Saddam Iraq would be apportioned according to ethnosectarian quotas, with Shiite Arabs representing 55 percent of the population, Sunni Arabs 22 percent, and Kurds 19 percent. The system, which became known in Iraq as muhasasa, was in effect an ethnosectarian power-sharing arrangement that privileged specific sectarian or ethnic communities over individuals, key issues, or ideologies. Of the seven full and interim prime ministers who have served in Iraq since 2004, only the current prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who came to power at the end of 2022, is not a returned exile.

Returning after decades abroad, Iraq’s exiles faced a legitimacy problem.

In the new Iraq, forming coalitions based on identity helped those parties led by returning exiles win elections. The United Iraqi Alliance won the first post-Saddam parliamentary election, in January 2005. It consisted of the major Shiite Islamist parties whose leaders used religious appeals—including the endorsement of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shiite cleric—to become the main vehicle for Iraq’s majority Shiite population. Coming in second, the Kurdistan List represented the dominant Kurdish parties, which relied on the memory of Saddam’s horrific crimes against the Kurds to mobilize votes. The CPA’s purging of the Baath party, which was disproportionately Sunni Arab, meant that Iraqi Sunnis did not have much representation in the first Parliament. Many Sunnis boycotted the vote, and the government that emerged from that election was in effect a joint Kurdish-Shiite affair with minimal accommodation for Sunnis. At the same time, political parties and movements that were not based on identity politics, such as the Iraqi Communist Party, did not stand a chance in Iraq’s new electoral system. 

The new political system sectarianized Iraq. Identity seeped into everyday bureaucratic procedures, such as getting a new passport or driver’s license; knowing, for instance, whether the passport administrator at a particular office was Sunni or Shiite helped speed a successful application. The physical map of many cities changed to reflect sectarian differences, with predominantly Shiite districts walled away from Sunni ones, for instance, and old roads closed and new routes opened to sectarianize neighborhoods.

Western media coverage painted a picture of a deeply divided country riven with ancient historical grievances. Saddam had managed to keep a lid on tensions, the narrative went, but in his absence all the old enmities had come spewing into the open. Expressing concern with the bloodshed, then U.S. Senator Joe Biden recommended splitting the country along three neat lines, apportioning one chunk for Shiites, one for Sunni Arabs, and one for Kurds. Such a Balkanized vision of the country’s future revealed an ignorance of its history: Iraqis had for centuries lived together without sectarian strife. To be sure, Saddam’s regime had introduced many of these tensions in a bid to divide and rule the country; Biden’s plan would have solidified these politically exacerbated divisions. Although the political system that followed Saddam—ironically devised to be inclusive and representative of the diversity of the country—did not break up the country, it has fueled ethnic and sectarian divides.

As politicians deployed identity politics to mobilize voters by stoking fear of the other, they militarized sectarian identities, leading to brutal civil strife beginning in 2006 with the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq and Sadr’s Mahdi Army and then again in 2014 with the rise of ISIS. These conflicts flared along sectarian fault lines, pitting Shiite against Sunni in battles that mirrored the animosity and divisions of Iraq’s post-invasion politics.

FEASTING ON THE STATE

Iraq’s enormous oil wealth powered the new system. As the de-Baathification purge gutted the old civil service that ran the country, Iraq’s new political parties could now vie over the hollowed-out government bureaucracy, which they saw as a means for enrichment; government positions afforded many officials the opportunity to skim from the public coffers of an oil-rich country. Parties jostled for positions in the cabinet, legislature, government bureaucracy, and judiciary in order to profit. They gave senior civil service roles to loyalists. These bureaucrats held sway over government contracting and procurement and many misused state budgets to benefit their ruling parties rather than government institutions or the public at large. The scale of the corruption was enormous: In 2014, Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the Iraqi parliamentary finance committee, estimated that corruption had siphoned away $551 billion from the government in the previous eight years.

As political elites have enriched themselves, Iraqis have suffered. The country continues to perform poorly in all human development measures and now has one of the worst life expectancies in the world. Yes, four decades of wars, foreign interventions, and civil strife have led to this devastating reality, but the system of corruption developed over the past 20 years has taken a significant toll. Iraq’s annual budget at times reaches $100 billion, and yet the government has continuously failed to deliver essential services to the people, such as the provision of water and electricity.

Look, for instance, at how political corruption has affected the availability of medicines in Iraq. The state pharmaceutical procurement company, known as KIMADIA, has an annual budget of around $1 billion. Yet as former finance minister Ali Allawi wrote in 2008, “pharmaceuticals were routinely hoarded by company officials and then diverted to the black market or illegally exported.” Companies linked to specific parties in Iraq’s new ruling elite profited from KIMADIA’s budget. This malfeasance had real consequences. Research by Chatham House found that over 70 percent of medicines available for purchase in Iraq today are either fake or have already expired.

To guarantee their impunity, the ruling political parties also coopted the institutions and mechanisms responsible for ensuring accountability, including the judiciary and the independent commissions, such as the anticorruption Commission of Integrity. The inspector general offices, created in 2003 to sit inside each ministry and monitor the conduct of its members, were dissolved in 2019. To this day, Baghdad’s political elites are more concerned with consolidating their hold on power than with setting up coherent and effective state institutions that could hold officials to account.

SAFE AT THE TOP

To protect their newfound power, Iraq’s elites also needed to prevent the return of a strongman such as Saddam who could dislodge them. They encouraged the CPA’s decision to disband the army in 2003, and did not want to rebuild it or disarm their affiliated armed groups. Instead, each party kept its own paramilitary group, leading to a proliferation of arms outside the command and control of the central government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and other local government structures.

These paramilitary groups helped safeguard the system, insulating the elite from challenges and threats such as insurgencies and protest movements. The formal Iraqi military, despite tremendous U.S. investment and assistance, remained weak. When ISIS emerged in 2014, the military crumbled and a few thousand militants swiftly captured one-third of the country. Finally roused into action by the possibility that ISIS could further rock the country, the political elites deployed their own armed groups and eventually expelled the militants from the country in 2017. 

A deeper, internal threat to the system emerged in October 2019, when disillusioned young Iraqis occupied Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and other public spaces in cities across the country’s south. Rather than calling for the resignation of a single leader or denouncing a particular party, they expressed ire at the system, decrying muhasasa and its factional division of the country. One protest banner in Tahrir Square read: “Not Shiite, not Sunni, not Christian. We are all one Iraq.” But in response to the protests, authorities deployed their agents of coercion—a patchwork of government and paramilitary groups—to snuff out the demonstrations, killing hundreds and wounding tens of thousands of people. The system did what it was designed to do. It has insulated itself from threats such as the return of a strongman leader in a coup or the growth of a popular revolutionary movement. This violence has made Iraq a more dangerous place for protesters and activists who decry corruption and call for greater democracy.

AT WHAT COST?

It did not have to be this way—or so goes the conventional wisdom. American missteps in the wake of the invasion doomed the rebuilding of Iraq. The CPA should have kept the Iraqi military intact and removed only the senior generals loyal to Saddam. It should have retained the government’s human capital instead of removing so much of the civil service under de-Baathification. Gutting the Iraqi state and military only sowed the seeds of future chaos.

But in light of the system that has emerged in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, another set of mistakes looks even more glaring. Not enough consideration went into the formation of the political order that would replace Saddam’s regime. The CPA should have convened town halls to find credible local leaders instead of deferring to returning Iraqi expatriates who wanted to empower themselves. The United States and its allies did not do enough to hold to account the exiles and political leaders that rushed in to fill the power vacuum in the country. They should have better defended Iraq’s nascent institutions—its new government agencies, the judiciary, and independent bodies such as the Commission of Integrity—which were under threat of capture from Washington’s local allies. This failure widened the gap between Iraq’s new political elite and the public. Instead, the United States built the sequestered Green Zone in Baghdad and isolated Iraq’s new leaders from the rest of society.

But time and time again, the United States and its allies prioritized their own domestic agenda, which sought quick wins to present to audiences at home instead of taking the time needed to genuinely build a state. They made politically expedient choices in supporting the seemingly stable status quo within the new system, even if doing so jeopardized the longer-term construction of a more effective Iraqi state. In 2010, they chose to back Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as he centralized power, eroded checks and balances, and oversaw a government accused of numerous human rights offenses. ISIS’s capture of so much of the country in 2014 was in part the result of Maliki’s poor governance: the Shiite sectarianism that alienated many Sunnis, the politically sanctioned corruption that weakened the state, and the reliance on paramilitary groups that enfeebled the military. Then, in 2022, Washington and other Western allies supported the incumbent prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, whose dubious quest to root out corruption resulted in alleged human rights abuses that were, according to The Washington Post, “an open secret among diplomats in Baghdad.” Iraq’s international partners may have thought that buttressing incumbent governments and supporting the operation of smooth elections would simply ensure the stability of the country, but that choice came at the expense of government institutions and the Iraqi people.

In the last two decades, Iraq’s population has nearly doubled. Most Iraqis are under 25 and have no memory of Saddam or his rule. Many do not buy into the post-2003 sectarian narratives that pitted Sunni against Shiite. Seeing living standards improve is their paramount concern; young people have struggled to find jobs or maintain their livelihoods. Iraqi authorities increasingly rely on violence to maintain power, and dissent in the country is becoming ever more dangerous. The international actors still involved in working to build the Iraqi state must heed the lessons of the past 20 years. Supporting the elite at the expense of institutions and the public interest will not strengthen Iraqi democracy—it will continue to weaken it.