A Frustrating Decade

The series of bomb attacks that yesterday killed over 50 people in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad is not an exceptional event in a country where about 4,000 die each year as the result of such attacks. These events tragically illustrate the reality of Iraq ten years after the invasion by the United States in the name of “global security,” according George W. Bush’s ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

Neither nuclear nor biological weapons were found in Iraq, and neither was Baghdad-sponsored Islamist terrorism. The campaign that destroyed the political and military structures of the dictatorship lit a civil war resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, mostly at the hands of the militia that emerged from the leadership vacuum. One decade and $1 billion later, no one can say with confidence that the Arab country is going to survive as a unified and democratic state.

On paper, the sovereign Iraqi government harmonizes the interests of the Shiite majority as well as Sunni and Kurdish minorities. However, in reality, the Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister with dictatorial tendencies who came into power in 2005, has firm control over dozens of security services and seeks to perpetuate his mandate by the end of his second term, despite the parliament’s contrary decision. Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam, are now the oppressed group in an open rebellion against the government. In the north the Kurds, virtually independent and greased in their petroleum, want little or nothing to do with Iraq.

Bush and Blair ignored the forces that unleashed the overthrow of the tyrant. Not only were the assumptions that justified the invasion false, but their echoes resound today in the passivity of the Obama policy in the Middle East, as well as its consequences. Democracy has not taken root and terrorism has not been removed from an Iraq seen as a large laboratory by Islamist fanatics. And Baghdad has not become a close ally of the United States — it is rather the Shiite Iran that deepens its penetration — or its privileged supplier of crude.

Few believe Iraq will return will the savage civil war of a few years ago. However, few believe in the progress of a divided country whose leaders are more attentive to sectarian intrigue than to the fact that almost half of the adult population has no work. Furthermore, it is also believed that Baghdad, with 20 percent of Iraqis, will remain a territory of bombers, despite its suffocating web of security.