Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, erupted into flames last week. A dozen protesters died in clashes as rioters torched government buildings, political party and militia offices across the city, and the Iranian consulate. Iranian-backed militias reportedly fired mortars at a compound that includes Basra’s airport and the U.S. consulate, leading the White House to issue a warning holding Iran accountable for the actions of its proxies.
Whatever threat Iranian-backed militias may be, the White House should not interpret the incident only through the lens of its Iran fixation. The protests in Basra have been a long time coming. Corruption has impacted Basra disproportionately for several reasons. The first is historical: Saddam Hussein’s decadeslong dictatorship deprived generations of Iraqis of capacity. Not only did he discriminate against the Shiites who dominate southern Iraq, but to be talented and effective in local government could be a death sentence in a regime which equated competence with competition.
Basrawis hoped for better after Saddam’s ouster, but they received little relief. While the tyranny might be gone, for 15 years, Basrawis have suffered under a series of governors, each of whom developed a reputation for corruption. Oil only exacerbates the problem.
So too has the second-order effect of the Islamic State’s rise. After ISIS seized Mosul in June 2014, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for his followers to help defend Iraq. Many of those who answered his call were policemen from Basra and other towns in southern Iraq. This created a security vacuum in which organized crime could thrive.
Demography also impacts public patience. According to Iraqi technocrats charged with planning, 40 percent of Iraqis were born after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and 60 percent after the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. A generation of Shiite politicians may have assumed automatic legitimacy simply because of their parties’ historic opposition to the Iraqi dictator. But for many ordinary Iraqis, this is now irrelevant as they have no real memory of the Baathist dictator: They no longer juxtapose Saddam with post-liberation politicians, but judge incumbents on their own actions.
Why not simply vote corrupt leaders out then? After all, Iraq holds real elections far more frequently than any other Arab country. It has had four prime ministers since 2004 and, after the Basra unrest, it may soon have a fifth.
When it comes to corruption, a sense of defeatism permeates Iraq society. This may be one reason why, prior to last May’s elections, Sistani dropped previous demands that all Iraqis vote. Rather, in a televised sermon read by his aides, he likened voting to a glass of water which an individual could choose to drink or not. In Baghdad and Najaf, Iraqis suggested he sought greater distance from the vote because he did not want corruption in any future government to taint the clergy.
Not all Iraqi leaders have a bad reputation. Iraqis say incumbent Prime Minister Haider Abadi is clean, even if many in his Cabinet are not. Cleanliness and efficiency, however, are not synonymous, although the latter isn’t Abadi’s fault as the Iraqi system does not allow him to control even key ministries. Few Iraqis see their parliament as clean. Iraqi voters replaced 65 percent of parliament in the last election. Contrast that with U.S. elections where, despite frequent harping about Congress, re-election rates normally exceed 90 percent.
But if Iraqis can punish incumbents at the ballot box, why the need to riot in the streets? The problem in Iraq, from Basra in the south to Erbil in the northern Kurdistan region, is that a firewall exists between powerful party bosses on one hand and elected politicians on the other. Elections do not determine Iraqi governments. Rather, horse-trading after elections does. After the Independent High Election Commission announces election results, party bosses take the results to horse-trade over who gets what position. Each position, in practice, is worth a certain number of seats. Major ministries like oil, defense, or finance might take several dozen seats, while minor ministries require less.
Negotiations can be intense. One hundred forty-three political parties combined into 27 coalitions in the last parliamentary elections. Few party bosses seek election themselves, but simply bargain for the spoils immune from voter demands. Incumbents are sacrificial lambs but easily replaced with others who will take direction from the party boss. The stakes can be huge. Take the Iraqi presidency, for example: The Iraqi budget allocates the president and his office about $43 million per year of which up to 95 percent disappears into party coffers or secret bank accounts. Simply put, it’s a racket.
The judiciary provides little recourse. Iraq’s anti-corruption laws are rooted in the Iraqi Criminal Code No. 111 of 1969. These address embezzlement, but do not address how corruption has evolved in the past half-century. Even if Iraqi governments had the political will to arrest those most corrupt, the judiciary would dismiss most cases for lack of legal clarity. It’s the parliament which would have to update the law, but the party bosses have no interest in seeing that done.
So what can be done? Abadi may be on the ropes, but he has staked his reputation to reducing opportunities for corruption. Biometric identification, electronic banking, and reduced payrolls all erode legacy corruption from Hussein’s era and the billions of dollars with which the United States subsequently flooded the country. Discouraging a big-tent government where every party shares the spoils and instead promoting the idea of a healthy opposition to hold the government to account would also help Iraq win the fight against corruption. Absent these reforms, however, whoever becomes prime minister, Basra might be the sign of things to come.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
