JIME News Report

The future of Iraq

Roger Hardy
Middle East and Islamic Affairs Analyst
(08/12/2010)

President Obama’s speech to war veterans on 2 August was an attempt to present his country’s withdrawal from Iraq as a foreign-policy success. He confirmed that by the end of this month the American combat mission there would end. The number of US troops would go down to 50,000 (roughly a third of their number when he took office). By the end of 2011, all US soldiers would be gone. This showed he was a man who kept his word to the American people.

Will they be impressed? It is true that Iraq has largely disappeared from the Western media. TV producers and newspaper editors see it as yesterday’s news and believe, rightly or wrongly, that the public has grown bored with it. But the Iraq story is far from over and – although President Obama barely hinted at it in his speech – Iraq will continue to drain American blood and treasure for some time to come.

Five months after the Iraqi elections in March – which were, amongst other things, meant to pave the way for the US exit – the country still has no government. (In a sign of his concern about this, President Obama is reported to have sent a letter to the leading Shi’ite cleric in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani, urging him to intervene to break the deadlock.) In addition to the political paralysis, the economy is in a mess, there is continuing violence and instability – and a question-mark hangs over the ability of the Iraqi security forces to cope, once US combat troops have gone. A further complication is the constant interference of Iraq’s neighbours in the country’s affairs, as they attempt to ensure the emergence of an Iraq that is congenial (or at least unthreatening) to their interests.

So what lies ahead? Four developments are likely.

Continuing American disengagement and, with it, a progressive loss of influence. One of the most perceptive observers of Iraq, Joost Hiltermann, describes the United States in a recent commentary as “a fading power in Iraq whose forces are departing and whose diplomacy appears rudderless”.
The eventual emergence (once the patience of the main political factions has been exhausted) of some sort of patched-up government in Baghdad – probably with someone other than Nuri al-Maliki, the present incumbent, as prime minister.
Ambitious efforts to achieve a five-fold increase in Iraqi oil production, to 12 million barrels a day, over the next seven years – efforts that will be severely handicapped by lack of infrastructure, endemic corruption and continuing insecurity.
The emergence of a Lebanon-like situation characterised internally by a lack of national consensus, and externally by a constant game of rivalry among the neighbouring powers – a “zero-sum game”, as the Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari recently described it.

A common view, both in Iraq and in neighbouring Arab countries, is that the country will simply fall into the hands of Iran. Such fears are overblown. As Marina Ottaway points out in a recent briefing for the Washington think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iran’s efforts to determine the outcome of the Iraqi elections, using cash and other forms of influence, were unsuccessful. Iraqis are proud nationalists resistant to any form of external domination.

So it is possible that no one country – Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia or anyone else – will be able to dictate Iraq’s future. There will be a constant jockeying for influence among both the internal factions and their external allies, with no outright winner. This, too, is reminiscent of the predicament of the Lebanese, with their time-honoured slogan “no victor, no vanquished”. But in the circumstances it may be the best that can be hoped for.