FINANCIAL TIMES: …Ten years later – and more than a year after Barack Obama pulled out the last troops – Iraq is indeed sovereign, as the US president declared. But it is not, as he also said, stable. It has a government of national unity that brings together the majority Shia population and the minority Sunni and Kurds but it is not being governed. Thanks to US spending and training, it has a collection of military and security agencies with an estimated 1.2 million personnel, for a population of 32 million. The north of the country is inhabited by the Kurds, who were already semi-autonomous and have benefited the most, their lands spared much of the sectarian fighting that blighted the rest of the country and protected by their own militias. Their economy is also booming, and they are exploiting their own oil resources…
American and British officials had calculated that the quest for “normality” would, in the aftermath of the invasion, push Iraq’s various sects – including the once dominant Sunni – towards compromise and peaceful cohabitation. What I found was a society traumatised by decades of war and sanctions, in the midst of a constant political storm. The new Iraq has a prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, whose partners in government denounce him on a fairly regular basis as an aspiring Shia dictator; a Sunni vice-president who fled the country more than a year ago after being accused of terrorism; and a long-time central bank governor who was sacked after being targeted in a corruption investigation. Iraq also has a finance minister who has just resigned after his bodyguards were arrested on terrorism charges. (All the officials deny the accusations.) “A black, black comedy,” is how Sarmad al-Tahai, a columnist for al-Mada newspaper, describes the state of the country’s politics. A young colleague from the same media organisation, 24-year-old Hamad al-Sayyed, is equally disenchanted. “We went from one-party rule to constant confrontation, to a lack of consensus, to parties which say they represent God on earth but which corrupt civil life.” An engineer who can’t find work in his field and is instead employed by al-Mada’s radio station, he tells me that his dream is to rebuild Iraq but“our dreams have been postponed.”… (more)
