Corruption to derail Iraq?

The new prime minister will be Adel Abdul Mahdi – which may be a signal of big changes coming.

Fifteen years after George W Bush invaded Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s imaginary “weapons of mass destruction”, what have the Iraqis got to show for it? There was a great deal of death and destruction (around half a million Iraqis have died violently since 2003), but they do now have a democratically elected government. Sort of.

Iraqis voted in their fourth free election last April – or rather, fewer than half of them bothered to vote at all, so pessimistic were they about the notion that voting can change anything. And after the election, the politicians seemed to be living down to their expectations.

Almost six months later, the many political parties were still bickering over which of them would be in the government, which would give them access to the huge amounts of money that are available to government ministers in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. It looked like business as usual, despite bloody riots in the south (where most of the oil is) over chronic shortages of water, electricity, and jobs.

But on Tuesday the Iraqi parliament elected Kurdish politician Barham Saleh to the largely ceremonial office of president. The president then has 15 days to nominate the new prime minister (who really runs the government), but Barham Saleh did it within hours. The new prime minister will be Adel Abdul Mahdi – which may be a signal of big changes coming.

Abdul Mahdi is not himself a revolutionary figure. He is a former finance and oil minister who, like Barham Saleh, has been a familiar fixture in Iraqi politics ever since the invasion.

But Abdul Mahdi is the figurehead of a coali- tion in which a revolutionary outsider, Muqtada al-Sadr, will be the dominant influence. Sadr’s party astonished everybody by winning the largest number of seats in the May election, drawing its support mainly from working-class Shias in Baghdad and the south, but his non-sectarian stance also drew votes from the marginalised Sunni minority of Iraqi Arabs.

His party has been among the least corrupt on the Iraqi political scene, and he is a nationalist who is equally opposed to American and Iranian meddling in Iraqi politics. He has disbanded his own party’s militia and urges others to do the same, and he promised to appoint non-political technocrats instead of usual party stalwarts if his party won power.

That promise will be hard to keep, since the extreme fragmentation of Iraqi politics means all governments must be broad coalitions. The coalition Sadr leads (although he will not personally seek office) includes the Iraqi Communist Party, which more or less shares his goals.

Corruption in Iraq is a system, not a series of individual crimes, and the beneficiaries of the system will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve it.

The Iraqi government employs 4.5 million people to do the same jobs very badly or not at all. Many of them rarely even show up at work, but they all vote for the right party at election-time. And since they are on the take themselves, they don’t protest when the senior politicians in their party steal millions from public funds.

This system was tolerated during the 15 years of war. Now that the fighting has died down, people are starting to protest, and Muqtada al-Sadr has become the repository of their hopes. He will have a hard time living up to them.