A decade of frustration

The succession of bombs that on Tuesday killed more than 50 people in Shiite quarters of Baghdad were nothing exceptional in a land where every year around 4,000 people die in terrorist attacks. The event illustrates the tragic reality of Iraq, 10 years after it was invaded by the United States in the name of “world security,” according to the ultimatum sent by George W. Bush to Saddam Hussein.

There were no nuclear or biological weapons in Iraq, nor was Baghdad sponsoring international terrorism. The campaign that destroyed the dictatorship’s military and political structures gave rise to a civil war with tens of thousands of deaths, mostly at the hands of the militias that have arisen to fill the power vacuum. A decade on and a trillion dollars later, no one can say for sure whether the Arab country is going to survive as a unified, democratic state.

On paper, the sovereign government of Iraq reconciles the interests of the Shiite majority with those of the Sunni and Kurdish minorities. In reality, a prime minister of dictatorial tendencies, the Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, who came to power in 2005, wields an iron first over dozens of security services, and is attempting to stay in power after the end of his second mandate, against the will of Iraq’s parliament. The Sunnis, dominant under Saddam, are now the oppressed, and are in open rebellion against the government. In the north the Kurds, virtually independent and financed by their oil, have little or no interest in belonging to Iraq.

Bush and Blair were unaware of the forces that the tyrant’s overthrow would unleash. Not only were the justifications for the invasion entirely false; none of its promised benefits have come to pass, and the aftermath goes a long way to account for the passivity of Obama’s Middle East policy. Democracy has failed to take root, while terrorism — which did not exist in the country before the invasion — is yet to be stamped out in a country which has become a chief breeding ground of Islamist fanaticism. Nor has Baghdad become a close ally of the US (it is Shiite Iran, rather, that is gaining influence there), nor its preferential supplier of crude oil.

Few in Iraq think a return to the savage civil war of a few years ago is possible. But equally few hold out much hope for progress in a divided country, whose leaders are concerned more with sectarian intrigue than with the fact that almost half the adult population is jobless, or that Baghdad, where 20 percent of Iraqis live, is still a territory haunted by terrorist bombs, in spite of its oppressive web of security.