San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
20 YEARS AFTER INVASION, IRAQIS SAY CHALLENGES PERSIST
Toppling of Saddam brought freedoms — and more corruption
A couple of streets away from the new buildings and noisy main road of the desert city of Fallujah, there was once a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone, the stands rotted years ago.
Now every inch is covered with gravestones.
“This is the martyrs’ graveyard,” said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, the cemetery’s custodian, who has looked after it since 2004, when graves were first dug for those killed as U.S. troops battled Iraqi militias. “I stopped counting how many people are buried here, but there are hundreds, thousands of martyrs.”
As Iraq marks the 20th anniversary Monday of the U.s.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, an army of ghosts haunts the living. The dead and the maimed shadow everyone in this country — even those who want to leave the past behind.
The United States invaded Iraq as part of its “war on terror” announced by President George W. Bush after the al-qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Bush and members of his administration claimed that Saddam was manufacturing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, though no evidence to back up those accusations was ever found. Some U.S. officials also said Saddam had links to al-qaeda, a charge that intelligence agencies later rejected.
Today, Iraq is a very different place, and there are many lenses through which to see it. It is a far freer society than it was under Saddam and one of the more open countries in the Middle East, with multiple political parties and a largely free press.
Still, conversations with more than 50 Iraqis about the war’s anniversary offered an often troubling portrait of an oil-rich nation that should be doing well but where most people neither feel secure nor see their government as anything but a corruption machine.
Many Iraqis see a bleak economic future because, despite a wealth of natural resources, the country’s energy revenues have been spent primarily on the vast public sector, lost to corruption or wasted on grand projects left unfinished. Relatively little has gone into transforming public infrastructure or providing services as many Iraqis had hoped.
“The living conditions are not good. The electricity is still bad,” said Mohammed Hassan, a 37-year-old communications engineer and father of three who supervises the laying of Internet lines in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, Baghdad, for which he is paid $620 a month. “I have hardly enough to get to the end of the month, so I cannot see much of a future,” he added.
Iraq remains indelibly scarred by a civil war, an insurgency and the almost constant upheaval that the invasion unleashed, which continued even after U.S. troops pulled out in 2011. Wave after wave of fighting gave way to political strife, and the country never fully stabilized. Two major cities — Mosul and Fallujah — have been largely destroyed, and damage is visible in almost every major town throughout central and northern Iraq.
It is hard to find anyone in this country who has not lost someone.
About 200,000 civilians died at the hands of U.S. forces, al-qaeda militants, Iraqi insurgents or the Islamic State terrorist group, according to Brown University’s Cost of War project. At least 45,000 members of the Iraqi military and police forces and at least 35,000 Iraqi insurgents also lost their lives, and tens of thousands more were left with life-altering injuries.
On the U.S. side, about 4,600 troops and 3,650 American contractors were killed in Iraq, and countless others bear physical and mental scars.
The Iraqi state’s weakness after the U.S. invasion made it fertile ground for powers in the region and beyond to cultivate their geopolitical ambitions. Among them were neighboring Iran and Turkey, along with the United States itself.
But Iran proved most adept at exploiting the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam and at exerting influence inside Iraq for its own goals. Iran spurred the creation of a parallel military force that was long outside the control of the Iraqi government. These mostly Shiite militias have tens of thousands of fighters, including some who are loyal to Iran.
Abetting and expanding Iran’s influence in Iraq was hardly the intention of U.S. policymakers in 2003. Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Iraq who was involved in the planning of the war, said he suggested to U.S. diplomats and military leaders that they might want to reach out to the Iranians.
“I said, ‘Shouldn’t we be figuring out how to talk to the Iranians about this and how to have them minimize their hostile involvement?’” he recalled.
He said his plea fell on deaf ears.
New freedoms but few jobs
Today, Iraq is a far different place from the one the Americans found in 2003.
Roughly half the population of nearly 45 million was born after 2000 and did not experience the strictures and frequent brutality of life under Saddam, who was captured by U.S. forces in late 2003 and, after an Iraqi trial, executed.
Young Iraqis’ perceptions are shaped by the violence that followed the U.s.-led invasion and, at the same time, by disappointment that their country still falls far short of the hopes raised by a more open society.
“Saddam Hussein was the Hitler of our times. He was the most brutal dictator, tyrant, that we have experienced,” said Barham Salih, Iraq’s president from 2018 to 2022 and a longtime member of the Iraqi opposition who, like many others, saw up close the torture and executions that Saddam used to keep political opponents in check.
“Once he was gone, suddenly we had elections,” Salih said. “We had an open polity, a multitude of press. Those things had not been seen in a long, long time in a place like Iraq.”
Such things are certainly rare in the Middle East, where dictators and autocrats rule in most countries and there is widespread repression of media freedoms and individual rights. More recently, both have started to come under threat in Iraq as well, largely from Shiite Muslim parties linked to Iran.
“If you put things in context, there have been a lot of positive developments,” Salih said.
Among those developments is a better relationship with the U.S. military. Its troops returned in 2014, this time at the request of the Iraqi government, and played a vital role in the fight to defeat the Islamic State. About 2,500 U.S. troops remain in the country.
For many Iraqis, it is hard to appreciate the positive developments when unemployment is rampant, with more than 1 in 3 young people jobless, according to the World Bank and the International Labor Organization. There are few private-sector jobs, which means that most people seek government positions. But there are not enough of those to go around for Iraq’s fast-growing population.
About one-quarter of Iraqis live at or below the poverty line, according to Iraq’s Planning Ministry.
Most troubling for young and old alike, however, is the increasingly entrenched government corruption, which is rooted in a system of sectarian and ethnic distribution of power that the United States pressed Iraq to put into place after Saddam fell. Transparency International ranks Iraq 157th among 180 countries in its corruption index.