America’s Sleeper Forces in Iraq

It is not difficult to see that in Iraq’s current situation, the United States’ influence and its impact on the political arena is less than before, but it is far from over. Setting aside the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the ground, they still have power in several important and vital areas including weapon sales and the role of Iraq’s forces in fighting terrorism.

In the same way, the U.S. is helping Iraq with investments which involve foreign companies, and in the issue of withdrawal from Iraq under Chapter VII of the United Nations, which prevents Iraq from acquiring full sovereignty because it is still paying reparations to Kuwait. It is obvious that there are many factors that allow the U.S. to put pressure on the Iraqi government. The belief prevails that America has lost in Iraq, but in fact, although Washington could not achieve any real positive results in the past nine years, it did manage to keep the door open by decreasing pressure in some areas, dealing with issues according to the importance of each and taking the time deemed appropriate.

According to statements American president Barack Obama made during a visit to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, Iraq is democratic, sovereign and self-reliant but this is the soapbox of American political discourse. Most Iraqis today see politicians as corrupt and consider them to have failed to provide security and jobs or improve services, and the highest levels of power are not exempt from this phenomenon.

This is a fair description of America’s policy for the past three years in Iraq since on the one hand, they helped with the 2010 election to broker a deal to create the current government but on the other, they worked to implement their own policies. They assert that only Iraqis can make the decisions, giving the pretext that there is a limit to what a country can do to ensure agreement in another country, but they forget that they played an active role in choosing many of the winners and losers in Iraq and they still do through Al-Maliki’s support.

In all of this we see that Iraqi politicians do not trust one another and they are turning policy-making into a zero-sum game and they are still prisoners of the past; they see their political adversaries not as people who can remove them from office, but as people who might kill or imprison them, and this makes it difficult to achieve a compromise. The lack of power for all the players in Iraq, both the prime minister and the opposition, makes it more difficult to achieve the progress that the people long for and there is no doubt that this absence leaves space for exploitation by armed groups and extremists in an attempt to create a state of chaos.