Iraq’s corruption crackdown is a start, not a solution
As charge d’affaires of the United States embassy in Iraq some years ago, I shocked US and Iraqi officials when I said the US Federal
As charge d’affaires of the United States embassy in Iraq some years ago, I shocked US and Iraqi officials when I said the US Federal Reserve should end the shipment of US banknotes resulting from Iraq’s oil sales and replace them within three years with digital transfers. As shocking as that was then, it is now the case that 95 percent of dollar transfers to Iraq are digital. This initiative certainly helped bring the Iraqi banking sector closer to international standards, but it had a more important goal: to make corruption harder than simply passing someone a handful of “shayeb”, Iraqi slang for $100 bills. But in Iraq, corruption is so pervasive that no single initiative or action will eliminate it, so new Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s high-profile arrests of 47 officials, lawmakers and politicians on Sunday needs to be the first step in a years-long campaign if it is to make a significant difference to the lives of ordinary Iraqis. These particular arrests appear to be the result of an investigation into the Ministry of Oil’s undersecretary for refining affairs, Adnan al-Jumaili, and include about a dozen members of parliament whose immunity was lifted. After many years working in and on Iraq, it would not surprise me if the investigation exposed links between these politicians, their political backers and the Ministry of Oil. Because of Iraq’s ethnosectarian power-sharing model in place since 2003, ministries are seen as money factories for whichever party or group “owns” them.
The US government, of course, has long been aware of this institutional corruption and tried to address it by supporting the creation of anticorruption agencies, but many Iraqis viewed those agencies as centres of corruption themselves. “When the auditors demand bribes,” Iraqis would tell me, “you know that corruption is pervasive.” More recently, however, the US government has taken a far more serious approach to cutting off the flow of dollars to Iran-backed militias, whose tentacles reach deeply into the Iraqi government and economy. As Iraqi security forces, backed by an international coalition headed by the US, liberated their territory from ISIL (ISIS) in 2017, the Popular Mobilisation Forces that had supposedly taken up arms to fight the armed group began to turn their weapons on the United States. Rocket attacks against the embassy resumed after a hiatus of many years, and attacks against US forces supporting the regular Iraqi security forces spiked. The US called upon the Iraqi government to protect our personnel as invited guests in their country, but the militias proved too powerful and too dangerous for the government to take serious action. Officials would sometimes denounce attacks and call for an investigation, or even arrest two or three low-level militia members from time to time, but would always avoid taking serious action. As we often hear in Lebanon, which struggles with its own Iran-backed militia, Iraqi officials would tell us they did not want to risk a civil war.
The BriefWire