What’s been happening in Iraq since we left?
Nothing good, I’m sure…still…any news is welcome.
It’s been about ten years which is just long enough to google an ex without it being too creepy. Her current flame is Muqtada al-Sadr: that guy who’s always hated you and her previous flame, Sadaam. There’s still sectarian violence but it’s eased enough where most of the uprisings are more about corruption and unemployment than a particular flavor of Islam.
My question was serious.
Well, I have this position paper but it’s a bit dated now. I cut and paste some quotes from it. The bottom line though is that ethnic division is still a huge issue in Iraq and probably always will be. Really, this is another example of the Europeans drawing arbitrary lines on a map and making it a country by fiat. Anyway, here are some quotes from the article:
Delayed reforms
The response by the main political parties to the 2019 protests ranged from a complete denial of any essential failures in the system to a partial admittance of failure while simultaneously blaming external forces. During the first week of the protests, Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said, “About 90% of the demonstrations are valid and their demands are legitimate.” But he did not rule out “the presence of infiltrators among the security forces, not just among the demonstrators,” adding that “the security forces still include people who may not believe in the current situation for one reason or another.” While Muqtada al-Sadr, former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and other political and religious leaders called for the government to resign in the first days of the demonstrations, the Fatah bloc and the State of Law were less motivated by such demands. There were also those that saw the political system as unable to fulfill its fundamental purpose and viewed any attempt to reform it as futile and only aimed at temporarily delaying its painful collapse, including through the use of violence.
The decline in trust in the system and the governing elites by multiple segments of the population and the factors that resulted in the October 2019 protests have been widely studied. In particular, researchers have pointed to the deep tensions and disagreements between the political parties and coalitions, as well as their effect on hindering government efforts to reform the system and redirect state priorities, especially in regards to the economy, finances, and services. Similarly, there is no shortage of analysis of the reforms needed to enable Iraqi institutions to provide a decent level of services and address their recurring shortcomings. Many Iraqi and international specialists have written studies and research papers laying out recommendations and policy plans.
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The failure to provide jobs and services drives deep unrest
More than 40 million people now live in Iraq, twice as many as 25 years ago, and more than four times the population in 1970. According to estimates from the Ministry of Planning, the population will double again in less than a quarter of a century, if current growth rates, which are among the highest in the region, continue. As a result, the Iraqi government will have to establish a favorable business climate that facilitates the creation of nearly a million jobs annually by the end of the current decade.
As the current business climate is unable to stimulate private sector job creation, the government is almost the only outlet for the approximately 700,000 young people entering the labor market every year, including hundreds of thousands of university and graduate school degree holders. The frustration caused by the lack of job opportunities has provided a recurring source of fuel for protests, although it is far from the only one. The primary driver of protests has been the limited ability of government institutions to keep pace with the increasing demand for basic services, including, most importantly, the provision of a stable supply of power in cities, especially in the hot summer months. Many other political factors have also played a role in previous waves of protests, and political parties, local civil society, and ethnic and religious groups have frequently organized demonstrations in Baghdad and elsewhere, including in Kurdistan and the western provinces, since 2003. However, the October 2019 protests were mainly sparked by the government’s inability to provide decent job opportunities. The clashes between the security forces and civilian protesters that followed led to the downfall of the Adel Abdul-Mahdi government and the deepening of the mistrust between the government and large segments of Iraqi society.
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Shrinking revenues and multiplying expenditures
In recent years, the payroll bill for government employees and contractors has accounted for a significant portion of the Iraqi government’s total operating expenses. In 2004 the combined cost of all government employee salaries and pension benefits was less than 4 trillion dinars, or about 12.4% of total government spending (31 trillion dinars), according to the final accounts prepared by the Ministry of Finance. This percentage has increased rapidly in the years since as both the number of government employees and their salaries have shot up in tandem, reaching 30% of total government expenditure in 2005 and 2006 and 38% in 2010 and 2011. This increase is even more significant considering that total annual spending more than doubled from 30 trillion dinars in 2005 to 70 trillion dinars in 2010 — before rising sharply again to 119 trillion dinars in 2013. While the period 2015-18 witnessed austerity budgets and relatively conservative spending, the 2019 budget allocated 43.4 trillion dinars for government salaries, in addition to more than 18 trillion dinars for social services, including pensions for retirees, subsidies for the social protection network, and other expenditures — accounting for a total of about 65% of expected oil revenue for that year. As for the current budget for 2021, it has allocated about 53.8 trillion dinars for the salaries of registered employees on permanent staff, in addition to 31.4 trillion dinars in spending for so-called social services. The total of salaries and social services is 85.2 trillion dinars, which exceeds the expected oil export revenues for the year (81.2 trillion dinars). This raised the planned deficit in the 2021 budget to more than 28 trillion dinars.
Oil export revenues have accounted for the largest share by far of the Iraqi state’s net income in recent decades, ranging from 98% in 2003 and 2004 to about 79% in 2015.
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Reforming the political system is key to avoiding imminent collapse
One of the great paradoxes in Iraq is that its party system cannot be described as democratic, and therefore, it is natural that the system is unable to produce true popular representation. Voter participation in elections has fallen over time, reaching a low of 44% in 2018. The main parties in Iraq have been led by the same people for the past two decades. Although many of them have witnessed divides and the rise of new splinter parties, the majority of these new parties are not democratic either. The dominant feature of Iraq’s parties is that they revolve around the personality of a single leader who will eventually be succeeded by one of his family members. Internal party elections, if they take place at all, are a mere formality rather than a means of ensuring the transfer of power to new party cadres, most of which were established to represent the interests of a family or limited leadership, even if they took on national, religious, sectarian, or regional trappings.
Not sure if you are looking for stuff on covid wrt Iraq, but found this article on it:
Iraq
60% of peak and rising
128 infections per 100K people reported last 7 days
Updated 3:56 AM MST
Average number of new infections reported each day in Iraq rises by more than 6,500 over the last 3 weeks, 54% of its previous peak
COVID-19 infections are increasing in Iraq, with 7,227 new infections reported on average each day. That’s 60% of the peak — the highest daily average reported on August 1.
There have been 2,210,582 infections and 24,389 coronavirus-related deaths reported in the country since the pandemic began.
Vaccination
Iraq has administered at least 15,622,179 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 19.9% of the country’s population.
There is a comparison at the bottom to how Iraq compares to other countries in the region…basically, Iraq seems to be doing about as well as anyone (assuming you trust either Iraqi or the other countries in the region’s official numbers).
My thanks.