Abu Bakr al Baghdadi may be dead — and Iraqis across the sectarian spectrum are grateful — but a more immediate crisis now looms in Iraq: Protests again spread across Baghdad and major cities in Iraq in recent days. Whereas Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi took down the blast walls surrounding the green zone and reopened the center of Baghdad to the Iraqi people, he returned the walls almost overnight, symbolically suggesting he would rather confront Iraqis with live ammunition than listen to their complaints and frustrations. Cutting internet, social media, and silencing media inside Iraq is a tired strategy. Iraq’s Lebanese friends are already bypassing Iraqi censors and distributing footage that shows the brutality with which some security forces are now attacking peaceful protesters. What began as general demonstrations against corruption and a lack of government services has morphed into something far more.
Iraqis first took to the streets across southern Iraq in July 2018, theoretically to protest corruption and lack of government services. Iraqis reap billions of dollars from oil sales, but to drive around Basra is to find trash-clogged canals, unpaved roads, and spotty electricity amid the ostentatious Kuwait-style mega-mansions of the politically connected. Not surprisingly, frustration among young and ordinary Iraqis runs deep. True, Iraqi government officials and foreign diplomats can say standards of living have improved in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s ouster. For the vast majority of the population, Shiites and Kurds especially, they would be correct. But more than 40% of Iraqis were born after Saddam Hussein’s ouster and no longer accept comparison to the past as reason to accept corruption or overreach by political militias in the present.
The summer 2018 protests morphed quickly from demonstrations for accountability into a proxy war between firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — a political prostitute (with the teeth of a meth addict) now closer to the Saudis — and Iranian-backed factions within the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces). Each group burned the headquarters or targeted the embassy of the party backing the other. Eventually, the 2018 protests faded because of a political agreement during government formation. That’s now falling apart. The difference is what once was a proxy war is becoming something far more dangerous. As political analyst Ahmed Shames notes, “The dynamic of the protests seems to have shifted from people vs. corruption to Sadrists vs. hashd factions.”
Most of the violence so far has been perpetrated by political party guards and by those at militia headquarters. The Sadrists are ready to take on Badr Corps forces and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, both of which are close to the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is not just rhetoric or bluster: Last Thursday, the Sadrists held a military parade in Zafaraniya (southeast Baghdad) and are openly armed with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. The militias are preparing as well.
The Sadrist want more concessions from Abdul-Mahdi’s government. The prime minister had tried to assuage them by appointing popular retired Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf. He is no Sadrist, but he does not speak negatively about them, and so his appointment shows Abdul-Mahdi seeking to appease Sadr. It likely will not be enough.
Sadr, meanwhile, has said his Sairoun bloc (the largest political bloc after the 2018 elections) will withdraw into opposition although, in the Iraqi context, it is not clear what being in opposition means since the Iraqi system is, in effect, a big tent in which different movements divide up the spoils. To withdraw the group from power would be to invite the purge of its members from government and thereby diminish the patronage, which is at the root of its power. Of course, if Sadr’s goal is to bring the government down and wash his hands of its failure, then that could presage greater instability. Especially, if a withdrawal from political battle coincided with a desire to fight Iranian influence by more violent means. And, a fight it would be because Tehran is unwilling to cede influence without a fight.
What does this mean for the United States?
Despite what the White House, State Department, and Congress so often assume, not everything in Iraq is about the United States — sometimes Washington really is on the sidelines. But it is worth noting how unpopular Iranian influence remains in Iraq and, for that matter, in Lebanon. That does not mean that Iraqis and Lebanese want to see Iranian domination replaced by American overreach, but rather that Iraqi and Lebanese nationalism matters. The question in Washington should not be how to engage Iran in a proxy war but rather how best to ensure Iraqis are strong enough to resist all malign influences.
It is also essential that American officials understand just how valuable Iraqi democracy remains. That Iraqis have, until now, largely argued about their differences rather than taken to violence as Iranian-backed factions now threaten to. What is occurring now is less evidence that democracy does not work and more a sign that Iran is so insecure as to seek to undermine it because they recognize that the popular will of Iraqis, and even Iraqi Shi’ites, is not necessarily pro-Iran.
The White House should also recognize Iraq and Lebanon are perhaps the Middle East’s most diverse countries. Outside officials may reminisce about so-called stability in the age of dictators, but it will not be possible for any Saddam-like strongman to emerge, no matter what Western, Arab, or Iranian leaders may believe.
The current protests, and the dangers they represent, also highlight how quickly malign forces can hijack popular movements. During the Arab Spring, both the Muslim Brotherhood and then the Egyptian military sought to co-opt and then eviscerate the democratic yearnings of the younger generations. Today in Iraq, Sadr and the Iranian-backed militias may be doing the same. The point is to recognize how fragile democracy can be and how much the outside word should seek to nurture it when possible. That the White House is missing once-in-a-life opportunities in Hong Kong and Lebanon will not be recalled by historians as evidence of “great and unmatched wisdom.”
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.
