Thanassis Cambanis

The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr at a demonstration in April against the bombings of Syria by Britain, France and the United States. CreditHaidar Hamdani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

[Published in The New York Times.]

May 11, 2018

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s parliamentary elections on May 12 might seem to offer more of the same because most of the leading candidates and movements have dominated the country’s political life since the United States unseated Saddam Hussein in 2003. But the 44-year-old firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr is leading an encouraging transformation, which could jar Iraq’s politicians out of their sectarian rut.

Mr. Sadr inherited millions of devoted followers from his family of revered religious scholars. Both his father and father-in-law were grand ayatollahs, the highest clerical level of Shiite Islam. He cemented his status by leading a bloody resistance against the American occupation and fighting the United States-allied government in Baghdad. He stubbornly defied foreign intervention, angering both Iran and the United States. He has purged corrupt operatives from his movement.

In the summer of 2015, Mr. Sadr made a potentially historic about-face, uniting with the Iraqi Communist Party and secular civil society groups who were protesting the government’s failure to provide security against the Islamic State or even the basic necessities of life, including jobs and electricity. Together, the new alliance demanded an end to corruption.

Iraq regularly tops world rankings for corruption and suffers endemic unemployment, which is particularly high among youth. When oil prices were high, alleged corruption reached an epic scale, but the people did not receive any benefits in infrastructure, jobs or services. Even vital security services were gutted by no-show jobs, as glaringly revealed when there was no army on hand to stop the Islamic State’s sweep through Mosul and Anbar Province to the gates of Baghdad.T

Corruption has kept Iraqis poor and almost left the country at the mercy of the Islamic State. That is why Mr. Sadr’s slogan “Corruption Is Terrorism” resonates with so many Iraqis. Frustrated with a decade of failures by the rulers in Baghdad, Mr. Sadr embraced civil society groups and their agenda: civic rights, better governance, fair distribution of resources.

An important outcome of Mr. Sadr joining a nonsectarian coalition is a new strain of pluralism and tolerance. The liberating effect is visible in how Iraqis irrespective of class, sectarian and sexual identities can reclaim public spaces without fear.

One spring morning, a group of young men in bouffant hairdos and burgundy and bright green three-piece suits hung out in Qishleh Gardens near Mutanabi Street, the historic gathering place of Baghdad’s poets and intellectuals. In the local context, their attire announced them as gay men. As the men in colorful suits walked around, the clerics recruiting fighters for the Shiite Islamist militias nearby didn’t even throw them a sideways glance.

In the afternoon, some of the men in colorful suits joined an anti-corruption demonstration led by supporters of Mr. Sadr. “We all want to put an end to corruption,” said Mohamed Ismail, a 26-year-old unemployed day laborer. “We are all together.”

Three years earlier, when demagogues loyal to Mr. Sadr were exhorting vigilante attacks on men seen as gay, the pairing would have been unthinkable. Back then, Iraq was riven by difference — the sectarian-hued struggle between the Islamic State, which purported to speak for the Sunnis, and the governments led by Shiite Islamists, who claimed to represent the Shiite majority that had been oppressed under Mr. Saddam.

At the Baghdad Cultural Center, adjacent to the Qishleh Gardens, smiling volunteers from Mr. Sadr’s organization distributed fliers with his pronouncements. “Our new goal is to start an independent technocratic government,” said Majid Hamid, a 26-year-old volunteer. “We have no problem with anyone who is Iraqi.” The movement’s emphasis is now on civic questions.

After more than a decade of dominance by Islamist Shiite movements, competitors for power can no longer meaningfully distinguish themselves by their sectarian identity. Self-styled religious parties have been implicated in every major graft scandal, including the mishandling of oil revenue and defense contracts.

In early May, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered cleric in the country, took the unprecedented step of declaring that true believers must not vote along sectarian lines and reminded voters that the clergy has not endorsed any party.

The biggest transformation of all has come during the fight against the Islamic State, which united all manner of Iraqis against nihilist fundamentalists: Shiite and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Muslim and Christian, religious and secular. Every major electoral faction includes a mix of Iraqis, and the ideas of nationalism and secularism are slowly returning to the Iraqi political sphere.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has roots in the secretive Shiite Islamist Dawa Party, has positioned himself as a nation-builder who thwarted challenges from Sunni supremacists and Kurdish separatists but is willing to accept any patriot as a member of his coalition. Even the most militant Shiite militias have included Sunni partners in their electoral coalitions, including the Fatah Alliance, led by Iran’s fearsome ally, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Mr. Sadr has ordered his followers to support the idea of a secular, nationalist government run by “technocrats,” experts who are not career politicians and supposedly will be able to solve Iraq’s ills. He touts the importance of the rule of law and civilian power.

In a series of interviews with politicians, analysts, fighters and citizens, I repeatedly heard that a broad range of Iraqis believe they are at the beginning of a “nationalist moment,” when the country’s political culture might be transformed for the better.

Mr. Sadr has reinvented himself countless times in an erratic political career and can be a fair-weather ally. His appreciation for new, secular allies is not an endorsement of liberalism or progressive views.

But Mr. Sadr has always been a nationalist, committed at least in rhetoric to unifying patriotic Iraqis regardless of sect or ethnicity. His current campaign for a civil, anti-sectarian, reformist government raises hopes and possibilities not experienced in recent Iraqi history. He is changing the terms of political debate.

His political lieutenants say they want to lead the Iraqi government, or else serve as a vigilant parliamentary opposition. Since 2003, every faction that won a share of votes opted to join a broad coalition government and extract its share of the spoils from the public sector trough.

Mr. Sadr shows that a political movement known for the exploits of its militia and corruption can also become a standard-bearer for root-and-branch political reform. His unlikely reformist alliance could give Iraq’s political culture the jolt it needs.

Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story.”

[Read the full report at The Century Foundation.]

In the fifteen years since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein from power, Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has distinguished himself from other emerging Iraqi leaders with his endurance, iconoclasm, and unpredictability. He has cut a bedeviling and at times magnetic figure in his country, and he is one of the few sectarian leaders whose popularity has crossed sectarian lines.

Through war, flips of allegiances, involvement in corruption, and military victory and defeat, Sadr has managed to preserve his maverick image as a stubbornly independent man deeply committed to his principles, even as those principles shift over time. Now, with the May 12 Iraqi elections approaching, he is trying to parlay his reputation as a nationalist free-thinker into a movement that can transform Iraq’s political system.

In fact, Sadr has fashioned himself into an unlikely tribune of reform in Iraq. A persistent thorn in the side of foreign powers and Iraqi politicians alike, the graying forty-four-year-old is now trying to radically reshape his country’s politics. He has freshly renounced religious sectarianism, building an alliancewith Communists and secular reform activists.¹ He has attacked Iraq’s corrupt spoils system, with slogans such as “corruption is terrorism” that resonate with millions of disenchanted Iraqis. His unorthodox electoral campaign joins Shia partisans, Communist ideologues and some of Baghdad’s secular elite. Sadr’s popularity, hard power, and unifying message make him a direct threat to Iraq’s political class.

Even though his movement is unlikely to win a majority, Sadr’s unique campaign and nationalist-religious-secular alliance has upended nostrums about Iraqi and Middle Eastern politics. He hopes to establish new guiding principles: Sectarian movements can change their politics and become secular and nationalist. Armed militants can take part in electoral politics and government. Sectarian constituencies can embrace nonsectarian principles and support power-sharing and coexistence.

The evolution of Sadr and his movement has unfolded along pragmatic lines, with many flaws and inconsistencies. Nonetheless, Sadr’s political makeover amounts to a groundbreaking and encouraging transformation. It compels other established movements in Iraq to address the core challenges of security and governance, while building trans-sectarian or nationalist coalitions. He sets an example for other leaders and political organizations interested in exiting the confining boxes of sectarianism and patronage and mobilizing broader, more fluid and inclusive idea- or policy-based movements.

The success of Sadr’s approach and platform is more important than that of his candidates. If his coalition is repudiated by voters, or abandons its plans to challenge poor governance, then we can expect more of the dispiriting business-as-usual from Baghdad. But if Sadr follows through after the election and promotes the formation of a platform-based government with a legislative opposition, then we can expect Iraqi politics to enter a new phase, moving away from narrow sectarianism and patronage-only politics. A transition to a government with some technocrat ministers, a real opposition, and some pretense of nonsectarianism is necessary if Iraq is to begin addressing policy problems that affect the stability of the entire Middle East. The most pressing concerns include securing and developing the areas liberated from the Islamic State and reincorporating Sunni Arabs and Kurds into Baghdad’s fold.

This report traces Sadr’s evolution, and both the perils and promises of the road ahead. It is based on more than forty interviews conducted in Iraq in February and March 2018, with support from a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Charismatic Provocateur

Iraqis have long bemoaned a lack of leadership and vision within the ruling class. The melee of corruption and militia-formation that has plagued Iraqi public life since 2003 has featured a parade of politicians and warlords, many of whom have evolved into effective operators. Yet only two indisputably strong, charismatic leaders have distinguished themselves from the fragmentary society of party bosses, warlords, tribal leaders, and the grifters and opportunists who have made deals with the wardens of cash. Those two are both Shia clerics, and no love is lost between them.

The first, and most influential, is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the single most authoritative leader in Iraq. A cleric of impressive intellect and conservative (rather than radical) nationalist views, Sistani is credited as a moderating force who at times kept Iraq from civil war and at others helped mitigate the scope and damage of sectarian conflict.

The other enduringly powerful figure is the far more junior Sadr, who in the wake of the U.S. invasion emerged as a strong counterpoint to Sistani’s style of leadership and modest ambitions. Sadr lacks the educational pedigree of the ayatollahs who are considered “marjaiya,” or sources of emulation, and whose teachings are followed by millions worldwide. Still, Sadr inherited the millions of passionate followers of his father and uncle, both revered ayatollahs; and he also continued the family feud against Sistani, whom the Sadrs regarded as too timid.

Sadr was not yet thirty years old when the United States invaded Iraq. His family organization already included a nationwide network of staff and offices, and Sadr quickly leveraged these to assemble a committed militia, the Mahdi Army. He emerged as a powerful and unpredictable force—violently opposed to the American occupation as well as to homegrown Sunni extremists.

Although he is a Shia cleric, Sadr made it clear with his rhetoric and style that he was first and foremost an Iraqi nationalist, not beholden to foreign powers, whether Iran, the United States, or another country. From 2004–08, the Mahdi Army forged a fearsome record of violence, fighting at different times against U.S. forces, Sunni sectarians, and fellow Shia movements. His fighters rallied, at least initially, under the banner of resisting the American occupation. In the first years after Saddam’s fall, the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist political organization made symbolic overtures to non-Shia resistance groups and expressed a willingness to ally with Iraqis of any sect or ethnicity (a commitment evident more in rhetoric than in practice). As a result, and especially in the early years following the invasion, Sadr was one of the few militia commanders who enjoyed at least some grudging respect across sectarian lines. The ensuing decade dulled his sheen somewhat, as his soldiers were implicated in some of the same abuses and sectarian violence as other factions, and his political partisans, the Sadr Movement, proved every bit as susceptible as other parties to the temptations of corruption. In 2008, Sadr officially disbanded his Mahdi Army militia, although much of its structure and membership survived in other guises within the Sadr organization. In 2014, in response to Sistani’s call for fighters to resist the Islamic State, Sadr launched Saraya al-Salam, (“Peace Companies” or “Peace Brigades”), a successor militia to the Mahdi Army which included most of its veteran officers who hadn’t moved on to other, more militant organizations.

Sadr’s trajectory has not been a simple one-way ascent from militia strongman to political player. His story abounds with course-changes and seeming contradictions. For example, he has witheringly attacked the Iraqi political system, even as he has deeply embedded his politicians within it. And though in 2018 he has mounted a new campaign against corruption, throughout the post-invasion years, Sadrists won a hard-earned reputation for epic corruption in their government fiefs, including the lucrative and critical health ministry which they controlled from 2006–07.

Unlikely Partners for Reform

In 2015, the rise of the Islamic State shattered the business-as-usual trajectory of Iraqi politics. Sectarianism had flourished, along with the corrupt spoils system. But foreign influence on Iraqi politics, along with security services crippled by corruption and no-show ghost soldiers, was no match for the Islamic State. Many Iraqis already had reached a breaking point because of raging unemployment and the government’s failure to provide basic services like electricity. Basic services had never been fully restored since the American invasion of 2003, despite years of banner oil profits, mostly lost to corruption. Protest camps sprung up around the country. In Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, followers of Sadr got to know followers of the secular reform parties, including the Communists. Over time, trust grew. Leaders of the secular parties were invited to meet with Sadr.

By the time the Islamic State shattered Iraq’s sense of security, Sadr was already changing course. With the protest movement, he adopted a newly moderate and inclusive rhetoric. Sadr threw his weight behind the protesters. He encouraged his political movement and followers to make common cause with secular reformers and independent technocrats. His followers ceased their very public attacks on homosexuals. “He has undergone a change, an evolution,” said Raid Jahid Fahmi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Communist Party, who has led the secular embrace of the cleric Sadr. “You will find a change in his vocabulary and thinking.”²

“Sadr is ready to cooperate with anyone with Iraqi interests,” said Fahmi. “This was a very important cultural shift.”³

After joining forces with protesters from other factions in 2015, Sadr and his top lieutenants repeatedly met with potential partners. Over time, leaders in the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Republican Party, led by a secular Sunni pro-American businessman named Saad Janabi, grew convinced they could trust Sadr—and that they would be given an equal role in designing the alliance, even though their parties were much smaller than Sadr’s following.⁴

“Moqtada al-Sadr is the only person who can summon one million people with a single call,” Janabi said. Secular Iraqis and even some sectarian Sunnis have come to believe Sadr’s nationalist rhetoric, he added.⁵

In coalition with his new partners, Sadr said he would support an entirely new group of technocratic candidates under a new name. He disbanded his existing “Ahrar” parliamentary bloc, with thirty-four members. He ordered them all not to run for reelection, clearing the way for a new slate of technocrats—the vague term of choice for Sadr and his movement to describe the putative category of professional, independent experts who they believe could improve the Iraqi government’s performance, unfettered by sectarian or political allegiances. Sadr’s new party is called “Istiqama,” which means “integrity,” and the overall coalition with the Communists and other smaller members is called “Sa’iroun,” which means “On the move,” or “Marching,” with the intention of evoking a march toward reform. The alliance’s goals are clear: a civil, secular state, run by technocratic experts who can fight corruption and improve governance.

Sadr’s New Platform in Context

Sadr’s record makes his positioning today all the more interesting. In the pivotal 2018 parliamentary elections, he has declared himself the leading opposition reform candidate. Some of his new claims strain credulity because of his checkered record, but his sheer power and loyal following mean he always has potential as a kingmaker. Electoral math makes unlikely his ambitions of winning the prime minister’s job for his political movement, but he is establishing an entirely new style of politics and rhetoric, which holds critical promise for Iraq and possibly for the entire region.⁶ First, he has fashioned a potentially inclusive national narrative from the grisly history of sectarian violence that has buffeted Iraq since 2003. Second, he has deftly eclipsed paralyzing political binaries, by forming an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party and a small array of independent, secular reformists. Third, he has spurred an open discussion of the central problem of Iraqi politics: the “muhasasa” system, most accurately rendered as the “allotment” or “spoils” system.

“This alliance is something new,” said Fahmi, the Communist leader, who has led the secular embrace of Sadr.⁷ “The political process must shift to a citizenship state from a constituency state. The sectarian quota system is incapable of giving solutions to the problems of the country.”

Since the fall of Saddam’s dictatorships, elections have done nothing to dent the sectarian-based patronage structure in which there is no opposition to the government, but only a shifting free-for-all to feed at the public trough. Elections merely determine what share of power each party gets—the more votes a party secures, the more profitable the ministries to which it lays claim. No successful party has ever refused to take part in the government, joining in the broken-piñata frenzy of corruption that has characterized Iraqi governance at least since Saddam’s era.

The 2018 elections come at a moment when much has changed in Iraqi politics, and Sadr has carefully shaped his movement to make the most of it. The upcoming vote arrives on the heels of a successful military campaign against the Islamic State (in which Sadr’s fighters played an important role), and the coming of age of Iraq’s Shia sectarian militias and Islamist parties. The Shia Islamist militant parties have dominated Iraq since 2003. They have defeated their main external rivals and corralled Kurdish separatism. They have fought each other, sometimes in bitter political contests and at times in outright war, as in 2008 when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki drove Sadr’s Mahdi Army out of Basra. Today, being a Shia Islamist militia no longer serves as a politically distinguishing identity. All the major electoral coalitions are led by Shia politicians, and most include some Sunni and Kurdish partners and candidates. Fissures within the Shia political space have strengthened other layers of political identity. Politicians now distinguish themselves by their approach to securing Iraq in the future from a resurgence of the Islamic State; balancing the influence of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States; and solving the nagging problems of poverty, development and corruption. While other Shia political parties are experimenting with nationalist identity in the wake of the campaign against the Islamic State, Sadr has been identifying as a nationalist for years. He stands out further still by his vigorous support for the idea of a civil, even secular, state.

Security officials still worry about continuing threats from the Islamic State, but according to some Iraqi analysts voters have already moved on. Polling, they say, shows that Iraqis are more concerned about livelihoods than anything else. “Security is no longer a priority,” said Sajad Jiyad, head of the Bayan Center, a think tank in Baghdad.⁸ “They’re asking for jobs, not for security.”

Yet even as Iraqi politicians pivot to face these new voter priorities, the electorate is meeting them with increasing suspicion and cynicism. Sadr has presented himself as something of a political outsider—and certainly not one of the Baghdad elite. His reinvention as a coalition builder enhances his appeal, suggesting he means it when he says he is ready to do business in a new way.

“The state is failing,” said Dhiaa al-Asadi, leader of the current Sadrist bloc in parliament and a political operative very close to Sadr.⁹ “The existing political elite are part of the problem. They can’t be part of the solution.”

Sadr wants to see the militias formed to fight the Islamic State fully reintegrated into Iraqi government control. He wants sectarian quotas abolished for public sector jobs and government positions. He wants a carefully balanced foreign policy that keeps Iraq equidistant from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. He has also been one of the only important Iraqi Shia leaders to oppose the involvement of Iraqi Shia militias in the Syrian civil war.¹⁰ He wants to come to terms with separatist Kurds. Above all, he wants to jumpstart the moribund economy to provide jobs and salaries to Iraqis—the poorest of whom are disproportionately part of Sadr’s following.

In this context, Sadr’s frontal challenge to the central narratives of Iraqi governance since 2003 has the potential to force the ruling parties to shift their rhetoric and approach. Indeed, the process can already be seen in action.

Bridging Old Rifts

Take, for example, Sadr’s changing relationship with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who, despite reservations about Sadr that have at times erupted into violent confrontation, has continued to court and collaborate with the cleric. Abadi has gone so far as to adopt some of Sadr’s rhetoric. One billboard at the entrance to Baghdad shows Abadi’s face and reads, “corruption and terrorism have one face,” echoing the Sadrist protest slogan, “corruption is terrorism.”

Abadi’s wary embrace of Sadr is especially significant given that the many of the latter’s supporters view Abadi as a villain. One recent demonstration, in February, marked the one-year anniversary of the death of fourteen demonstrators—killed at the hands of Abadi’s security forces while marching toward the Green Zone. Marchers carried flag-draped coffins commemorating the “martyrs for reform” in the same manner that they would honor martyrs who died fighting the Islamic State.

Abadi and his allies have opted to accept Sadr as a potential partner, although Sadr’s critical rhetoric has made them wary. “I think we should distinguish between the election campaign and the reality,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a member of parliament and a close ally of the prime minister.¹¹ “It is very easy to stand against corruption,” he added, but much harder to articulate tangible policy proposals.

Perhaps even more significant than Sadr’s partial rapprochement with Abadi is that with Sistani. Despite Sadr’s persistent popularity, Sistani’s influence remains more important—but also more diffuse. Sistani’s clout with Iraqi Shia is not absolute nor instrumental; he doesn’t directly control any political parties or militias, and despite his extensive efforts, he has been unable to persuade Shia politicians to avoid corruption, violence and sectarianism. Still, his edicts hold force. It was a fatwa from Sistani in 2014 that created the popular mobilization units (“al-hashd al-sha’abi,” or PMUs). Almost all Shia in Iraq heed Sistani’s edicts, and he has been credited on multiple occasions with limiting the deleterious impact of Iraq’s worst crises. Sistani has telegraphed his disappointment with the record of the Shia Islamist parties that have dominated Iraq’s government since the 2005 elections. The Shia parties almost uniformly try to claim the approval of Sistani and the other senior Shia clerics, even when Sistani has made clear that he supports none of them. Sistani warned leaders of the Shia militias not to parlay their battlefield success into political campaigns, but most of them ignored the order, to Sistani’s chagrin.

In an interview, a representative of Sistani criticized militia leaders for seeking “political advantage” from the “blood sacrifice” that Iraqis of all sects made in the resistance against the Islamic State.¹² As the parliamentary campaign has heated up, Sistani has made his displeasure even more clear. One cleric close to Sistani went on Furat Television to warn voters not to make their choice based on sect.¹³ “The corrupt people we have voted for have robbed the nation. We ought to not vote for them again, even if they are members of our clan or sect,” said the cleric, Rashid al-Husseini.¹⁴ “I would rather trust a faithful Christian than a corrupt Shia.”

Historically, Sadr has been at odds with Sistani and the other senior clerics in the marjaiya. In the current campaign, however, he has closely shadowed Sistani’s pronouncements about corruption and the need to elect new leaders. In recent statements, Sadr has addressed skeptical voters who have lost faith in the political process because of the corruption and failures of previous Iraqi governments, including those with the participation of Sadrists. “We will not be deceived by the lies again,” Sadr wrote in an April 14, 2018 statement.¹⁵ His own movement’s previous failures, he said, “give the motivation and determination to succeed in this election.”

On April 4, 2018, Sadr released a series of arguments against boycotting the elections. “Some ask, and say: the corrupt and the old faces will stay in power whether we vote or not,” Sadr wrote. He offered thirteen rebuttals, evoking religious loyalty, patriotism, optimism, and the responsibility of citizenship.¹⁶

In today’s Iraq, Sadr boasts a unique status.¹⁷ He can count on nearly absolute devotion from his rank-and-file followers, his organization, his political party and his militia. Even Sadr’s opponents recognize his political heft. In this, he is different from other Iraqi religious leaders only in degree: Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former national security adviser who is close to several senior Iraqi politicians, said that millions of Iraqis venerate clerics and will do whatever those clerics instruct.¹⁸ During a visit by Sadr to the Kadhamiya shrine in Baghdad, Rubaie recalled, Sadr’s followers crowded the cleric’s jeep to touch the dirt on its wheels, which they smeared on their heads as a blessing. “If he orders these people to set themselves on fire, they will do it,” he said.

Sadr’s positions have appealed to Iraqis who are weary of conflict but seek to maintain dignity and integrity in their foreign relations. For example, Sadr has softened his rhetoric about secularists, and has been willing to mend fences with Saudi Arabia and criticize Iran. But at the same time, he has maintained a hard line against the United States, whose influence in Iraq he considers wholly malign.

The fact that those positions are accommodating while remaining tough and without being overly compromising—much like his evolving relationships with Abadi and Sistani—make his calls for unity that more meaningful.

“Healing is gradual,” he said in the April 14 statement. Iraq has never before experimented with professional technocratic politicians, “without any partisan or religious or ideological or ethnical indications, to choose the most effective and the best [leaders] for the love of Iraq, and the love of Iraq is of faith.”

Managing Expectations

If this account of Sadr’s well-timed transformation into a champion of nonsectarian political reform sounds a little too gung ho, there are plenty of structural and historical reasons to readjust expectations to a more realistic level.

The results of the May 12 election are likely to set in motion a long negotiation process; many seasoned Iraqi politicians and analysts believe the outcome will be another unity government like all those that have ruled Iraq since the U.S. occupation, with goodies and power divided among sectarian parties. Sadr has pulled many about-faces before; he may tire of the alliance with secular parties, or he might decide he can better serve his constituents by joining yet another weak coalition government. “Moqtada al-Sadr has been on television and in politics for fifteen years and he has accomplished none of his goals,” said one political insider close to the government. “He has been revealed to be someone who cannot be trusted.”¹⁹

Fighting Sectarianism

Specific aspects of Sadr’s past raise questions about his sincerity. For example, despite his maverick image, he has played his part in the problem of sectarianism. The Mahdi Army orchestrated some of the worst ethnic cleansing and sectarian killings of 2006, although Sadr subsequently pulled his loyalists back. Many of his extremist supporters defected to other organizations or founded their own, like Qais al-Khazali, who is now the leader of Asaib al-Haq, a Shia militia close to Iran.

Some secular leaders never overcame their mistrust of Sadr, with his religious background and history of secrecy and political about-faces. One of the secular reform leaders who rejected the coalition is Shirouk al-Abayachi, leader of the National Civil Movement and a member of parliament.²⁰ Sadr’s organization is “foggy” and evasive, she said. “One year ago they would call us infidels,” she said. “We don’t know what they want from us.” If the Sadrist alliance does well in elections, she said, history suggests that Sadr and his lieutenants will make the important decisions, rather than deferring to the independent secularists from tiny parties. “We don’t just want seats in parliament,” Abayachi said. “We want to build a clean alternative.”

Despite his conciliatory reform rhetoric, Sadr has been willing to turn to outright confrontation with the state. Despite his status as a junior partner in the Iraqi government, Sadr personally broke through the security cordonsurrounding Baghdad’s Green Zone in March 2016.²¹ His followers set up a protest camp in the heart of the government, even briefly occupying parliament and the prime minister’s office.

Pervasive Corruption

When it comes to fighting corruption, there are similar reasons to moderate enthusiasm for Sadr.

Existing anti-corruption efforts suggest it will be difficult to make meaningful inroads against the spoils system. “The system needs to be reformed but there is no incentive to reform,” said Ali al-Mawlawi, director of research at the Baghdad think tank the Bayan Center.²² “The government has hard evidence, but the corrupt judiciary won’t prosecute.”

Even Sadr’s own politicians have struggled to have an impact, and critics of Sadr’s reform program point out that it is short on specifics. Jumaa Diwan al-Badali is a Sadrist member of parliament who represents the poor Baghdad district of Sadr City (which takes its name from Moqtada al-Sadr’s father, Mohammad al-Sadr); Badali is also the rapporteur of parliament’s integrity committee, in charge of investigating corruption. His experience shows the limits of any serious effort at reform. His committee has publicized some problematic contracts, often resorting to media leaks to force the government to pay attention. Parliamentarians have uncovered kickbacks and fishy contracts in the department of defense, including one case, Badali said, where the department attempted to buy subpar and nonexistent equipment for the fight against the Islamic State.²³

The biggest contract they stopped was a $2.5 billion weapons deal with China, which was part of the 2017 budget. Badali believes the U.S. encourages corruption in Iraq as a way of keeping the country and its security forces weak. “I don’t accept the prime minister’s depiction of Iraq as a pool of corruption,” he said. “We are a country with some corruption. We are not the most corrupt country in the world.”

Aside from the general difficulty of rooting out corruption, Sadr and his allies are hardly innocent of graft themselves. Sadr’s militia, the Saraya Salam (“Peace Brigades”), a PMU created in 2014 from the remnants of the Mahdi Army, has benefited from government funding. Corruption clearly played a role in eroding the combat readiness of Iraq’s security forces prior to the rise of the Islamic State, but the rise of new security institutions, including the PMUs, has only fueled the type of corrupt militia patronage that has hobbled the central government.

Over the years since 2003, Sadrist ministers and members of parliament joined the corruption frenzy as well, taking kickbacks and doling out patronage jobs through ministries under their control. Sadr’s principal secular ally, the Iraqi Communist Party, also enjoyed influence through the spoils system, winning positions in the cabinet despite very winning very few votes. Fahmi, the current Communist leader, served as minister of science and technology from 2006 to 2010. Fahmi preserved his reputation for probity through his time in government, although—critics of the Sadrist reform project are quick to point out—he wasn’t able to roll back corruption by other parties in government.

“Who can fight corruption?” said Ahmed al-Krayem, a tribal leader and provincial politician who alleges that Sadr’s followers and fighters participate in the same kickbacks and extortion schemes as every other Iraqi political party and militia group.²⁴ “The Sadrists won’t fight corruption.” Even the prime minister, Krayem pointed out, has been dogged by allegations of corruption from his earlier stints in government before taking over as premier.

Interestingly, Sadr doesn’t refute charges that his own movement is implicated in the failures of past attempts to root out corruption, but rather insists that change depends on continuing engagement and changing tactics. “We didn’t hope to be corrupted,” he wrote in answer to one supplicant who asked how Sadr justifies his political campaign given that his movement has participated in every single one of the corrupt governments since 2003. “We are rising up against the political process from the inside, rather than from the outside.”

Profound Political Problems

Some of the differences within the Sa’iroun coalition seem unbridgeable. Sadr’s Shia followers fought the United States and died in droves. Janabi’s secular followers include many elite Sunnis who are openly fond of the Americans. The Communists, meanwhile, have a long history of tensions with the clergy. Still, supporters of the alliance say these differences won’t lead to political fissures. “Sadr can control his people if there are problems. We will control our followers,” Janabi said. “We agree about fighting sectarianism.”

Another sticking point for Sadr’s agenda may be that the idea of apolitical “technocrats” who just get the job done may be something of a fantasy—at least for Iraq.

Even Sadr’s supporters point out that technocrats can only have impact if they are effective politicians. “I don’t believe in technocrats,” said Hakim al-Zamili, an influential Sadr lieutenant who runs the parliament’s security committee.²⁵“Only a strong politician with a base in a political party can succeed. The country is full of militias, people with weapons in the streets. An independent technocrat without a political party can’t do anything.”

Independents have served as ministers in Iraq since 2003, and none has managed to change the system. The types of figures who can change the system, Zamili said, are tough political veterans with the backing of formidable parties. “Maybe a political technocrat like me can do something,” he said. “No one can threaten me, no militia. I can speak, I can interrupt someone, no one can stop me.”

Iraq’s system is broken; it might benefit from repairs, but Iraqi voters should not expect a wholesale revolution. “Let’s be honest—we can’t accomplish everything we are planning,” Zamili acknowledged.

Murder in Samarra

Power politics in Iraq can play out at a visceral level, and one recent incident has underlined both the frailty of Sadr’s new vision, and its promise.

Sadr has repeatedly taken the position that there should be only one central authority in Iraq—the state—and that all militias must be integrated into government control. At the same time, he commands thousands of militia fighters in the Saraya Salam, most of them stationed in the flashpoint shrine city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. Samarra is a mostly Sunni city that is home to one of the most holy spots for Shia Muslims, the site where it is believed that the twelfth imam went into occultation in the ninth century. Sunni extremists blew up the Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006, setting off one of the deadliest periods of sectarian fighting in Iraq. Islamic State fighters held sway in Samarra until Shia militias drove them out in 2014.

Since 2015, Sadr’s militia has held sole control of the city. According to Sadrists and Saraya Salam commanders and fighters, their tenure in the city has been a model of success. They have formed partnerships with local business owners and tribal leaders, most of them Sunni, and have restored security and the business that comes with pilgrimage traffic. Critics accuse the Sadrists of ruling the city with an iron fist, detaining political critics, and extorting money from local traders and business owners. The accusations were repeated in multiple interviews with the author, and aren’t out of the ordinary in Iraq; in fact, the accusations levied against the Sadrist militia are much milder than those heard in zones ruled by other Shia militias, where displaced Sunnis live in fear of disappearance and, in some places, of summary execution.

The fact remains that the Sadrists are running a fiefdom, a state-within-a-state in Samarra; while such behavior is the norm in today’s fragmented Iraq, it contradicts the Sadrist platform of reforming the state under a unified nationalist banner. In March, the dangerous equilibrium resulting from so many overlapping security forces collapsed with a shootout between allies in Samarra. On Tuesday, March 13, the prime minister’s personal security detail was driving north in a convoy, preparing for Abadi’s planned visit later in the week to Mosul. The road took them through Samarra. At the town’s main checkpoint, according to two members of a committee that investigated the incident, the convoy refused to stop at the Saraya Salam checkpoint, as they are required to by law.²⁶ Commandos from Battalion 57 of the Iraqi Army, the prime minister’s special unit, went so far as to confiscate weapons from some of the Saraya Salam fighters at the checkpoint. “It was humiliating,” said one of the members of the investigative committee that visited Samarra days later.²⁷The angry fighters radioed ahead to the next checkpoint, a kilometer away, where Saraya Salam militiamen blocked the road with Humvees and confronted the convoy. Dozens of gleaming black sports utility vehicles swarmed the checkpoint. The army unit then fired toward the checkpoint. The Sadrists returned fire, killing Brigadier Sherif Ismail, the battalion commander and a trusted supporter of the prime minister.

Both Sadr and Prime Minister Abadi avoided public recriminations, and ultimately the killing was settled through a tribal agreement. The military unit, according to the investigative committee, was at fault for ignoring proper checkpoint procedures. “We need to develop a culture of respect,” said Zamili, the Sadr lieutenant, who was one of four members of the investigative committee. Another member of the investigative committee, who is not from either the prime minister’s or from Sadr’s bloc, blamed a lack of professionalism. “They were arrogant. They wanted to show off, they didn’t want to follow the rules,” the member said. “It was 100 percent an accident.” Political, military and economic power are inextricably intertwined, and state authority is severely compromised. This particular killing strained but did not break the alliance between Abadi and Sadr, but it revealed yet another potential point of rupture. Tellingly, it was resolved not by the judicial system or by a formal political process, but by a combination of ad hoc investigation and informal tribal justice.

Turning Point Election

The 2018 elections will set the course for Iraq’s government for at least another four years. If the current spoils system continues, with every major party joining into yet another ineffective unity government, Iraq can expect to repeat similar crises. It will be nearly impossible to maintain the effective national security approach that defeated the Islamic State—an approach that required unified command, mass mobilization, and help from all of Iraq’s competing allies, including Iran and the United States. Economic development will require warm relations with Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia, and, at the very least, a curtailing of rampant corruption. None of these improvements will come to pass without a powerful prime minister, a meaningful opposition, and competent ministers. Sadr’s trailblazing coalition marks a crucial possibility for Iraq: the mainstreaming of civic-secular nationalism, and the passing of national politics from sectarianism into a new phase. More emphatically than any other leader, Sadr has abandoned religious and sectarian discourse, showing that a Shia cleric with a sectarian base can embrace civic, secular politics. There is, of course, ample precedent for such politics in the last century of Arab political history, but sadly, very little among contemporary Iraqi political leaders.

An informal quota system reserves the most important job, prime minister, for a Shia, and the presidency and speaker of parliament for a Kurd and Sunni Arab respectively. If this new tradition survives another electoral cycle, it will fast become the kind of pernicious unwritten tradition that cannot be changed—like Lebanon’s sectarian quotas, which have become unassailable even though they are not in the constitution.

In his alliance with Communists and secularists, Sadr has mainstreamed civic politics. If he sticks with his current course, he can also set an example for other leaders who are willing to move past their origins as sectarians, clerics, or militia leaders. Despite his pointed anti-Americanism and history of armed resistance, the United States should welcome Sadr’s new role. So should Iran, which hoped to make Sadr into one of its proteges before the cleric broke with Tehran as well. Sadr’s broadsides against the United States (his lieutenants regularly brand the Baghdad embassy as a “devil” spreading sedition and strife in Iraq) shouldn’t obscure the common interests he shares with the United States and its Iraqi partners: building a strong, effective government and encouraging a nonsectarian, inclusive national identity that can help end the cycle of sectarian violence.

Sadr’s new rhetoric, and his secular political alliance, mark one of the most promising developments in contemporary Iraqi politics. There are plenty of reasons to question his sincerity, or the durability of the partnerships he has forged since 2015, but those partnerships hold the potential to change the tenor of the entire political playing field. Sadr’s reinvention of himself from militant cleric to nationalist anti-sectarian statesman comes at a time when other sectarian movements have begun to realize that they will need support from multiple constituencies in order to survive politically. In the likely event that the alliance doesn’t win enough seats to form a government, it can contribute still more profoundly to Iraq’s political development by opting to stay out of power and serve as a parliamentary opposition. Iraq stands at a turning point, where its largely sectarian political movements are experimenting with nonsectarian politics, and where its ruling class is confronting the dead-end to which the spoils system has brought the country. Sadr’s gambit stands a chance, albeit a slim one, of catalyzing the political transformation that Iraq so sorely needs.

To be sure, Iraq will still play host to endemic corruption and patronage, but a sharp change in politics can expand the government’s agenda to include long-term governance along with the usual business of padding state contracts and doling out ghost jobs. Without the sort of transformative nationalist, professional, and anti-corruption politics advocated by Sadr, Iraq is sure to face an ongoing cycle of crises that will destabilize not only Iraq, but also its neighbors and U.S. interests in the Middle East.

With Kurdistan’s independence referendum ending in fiasco, and Mosul recaptured from ISIS, what’s next for Iraq? Arguably, Iraq is the biggest success story right now in the Arab world.

In the latest episode of the TCF World podcast, I asked two experts to share their views on what comes next for federalism and the reconstitution of an Iraqi state and identity. You can listen to Christine van den Toorn and Renad Mansour through TCF’s website, or you can find the podcast directly on iTunes.

An Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Services member prays in the Old City of Mosul on July during an ongoing offensive to retake the city from Islamic State group fighters. FADEL SENNA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

The collapse this month of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has been greeted with joy and relief in many quarters, especially among the millions of civilians who directly suffered the extremist group’s rule. Much of the predictable analysis has focused on long-term trends that will continue to trouble the world: the resonance of extremist jihadi messaging, the persistence of sectarian conflict, the difficulty of holding together disparate coalitions like the clumsy behemoth that ousted ISIS from its strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul.

But jihadis and sectarians are not, contrary to popular belief, the most important engines of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar groups. Nor are foreign spy services the primary author of these apocalyptic movements — as many around the world wrongly believe.

No, the most critical factor feeding jihadi movements is the collapse of effective central governments — a trend in which the West, especially the United States, has been complicit.

An overdue alliance of convenience mobilized against the Islamic State three years ago, but only after leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had taken over enough territory to declare statehood. The ISIS caliphate was as much as a state — for as long as it lasted — as many other places in the Middle East. Most of the coalition members detested ISIS, but only the local members from Iraq and Syria whose families were dying or suffering under Islamic State rule were fully invested. For the rest of the anti-ISIS coalition, fighting the caliphate was one of many other priorities.

The glacial, slow-moving, coalition united against ISIS but bound by little else. It is sure to dissolve quickly now that the emergency is over.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the defeat of the ISIS caliphate a “critical milestone,” and Iraqi prime minister Haider Abadi hailed “the failure and the collapse of the terrorist state of falsehood and terrorism” that ISIS had proclaimed from Mosul. Yet even as the partners cheered the defeat of one state, they acknowledged the need to rebuild another one — Iraq — if they want to avoid cyclic repetition of the same conflict. Abadi, like American commanders on the ground, described a daunting task: to unify feuding militias, provide services to long-ignored populations, and perform effective police work — in short, to finally extend a functional state throughout Iraq.

In the years since terrorism has become an American obsession, much attention has focused on the root causes of nihilistic violence. The latest iteration of this vague quest, which attracts billions of dollars in government funding, is “countering violent extremism.” But it’s entirely possible that violent extremists aren’t really the problem at all; they only matter in places where the state is too weak to provide security, or too incoherent to explain why terrorist attacks are merely a crime, rather an existential threat.

Here’s another way to put it: There is no after ISIS, because ISIS isn’t the problem. The collapse of states is.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE INFANTRY troops in the war against ISIS, in fact, come from movements whose long-term aspirations are accelerating the collapse of the state order in the Middle East. To be sure, the key fighting groups — the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga, the Shia militias referred to as the Popular Mobilization Units, and the Syrian Kurds from the PKK — are nothing like ISIS. They aspire to political and territorial power without the murderous, nihilistic sectarianism of the Islamic State. At the same time, these groups all profoundly oppose central government in the areas where they live. Some, like the Iraqi peshmerga, want to form a smaller, independent Kurdish republic, even though they are internally divided in a way that promises future strife and civil wars, not harmony. Others, like the Shia militias, want to carve out an autonomous state of their own that functions in the lee of a hobbled central government.

The United States has contributed mightily to this dismal state of affairs. To solve an immediate problem, ISIS, it guaranteed a still-more toxic long-term problem: an ungovernable zone stretching from the Mediterranean to the Zagros Mountains, where death squads, militants and fundamentalists will continue to proliferate.

And as ISIS taught us well, local problems rarely remain local.

The central problem to face after the ISIS caliphate, then, isn’t whether the Islamic State will return or in what form, but when we’re going to tackle the epochal and complex challenge of supporting coherent states in the Middle East. The United States has been a major catalyst of the current entropy and chaos in the Arab world — sometimes through direct destabilizing actions, like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and other times abetting long-term corrosion by backing ineffectual, tyrannical despots who ransack their own states in order to cling to power.

Much of the immediate response to the collapse of the caliphate centers on Sunnis, and is cast in simplifying sectarianism. Can their grievances be better addressed, to stop their ranks from breeding foot soldiers for nihilists? Can Shia partisans slake their thirst for power and share enough of spoils to coopt disenfranchised Sunnis?

There are some important points nested in this type of analysis, but it overlooks one essential fact: Factors like sectarian identity, jihadi extremism, and mafia corruption only become dominant pathologies in areas where the state is no longer fully in control. The Islamic State can claim adherents in dozens of countries. But an Islamic State insurgency only rises to central importance where a failing state has left a vacuum.

The glacial, slow-moving, coalition united against ISIS but bound by little else. It is sure to dissolve quickly now that the emergency is over.

Compare, for example, the ISIS campaign in the Levant, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi established his short-lived state, to the far less potent Islamist insurgency in Egypt. Sure, followers of the Islamic State have murdered civilians, attacked state targets, and created limited mayhem in parts of Egypt — but the Egyptian government and security services remain powerful and as much in control as they ever have been.

State narratives and identity also limit the power of the nihilist narrative. Governments in Iraq and Syria struggle to convince all their citizens that the state functions everywhere and cares for all its citizens. But ISIS attacks on civilians in places like the United Kingdom, France and Egypt, cause consternation but don’t raise questions about the very viability of those states.

The Islamic State is a murderous movement. The existential threat comes not from ISIS but from state failure — a failure that precedes, rather than results from, the rise of violent fundamentalists.

THE ISLAMIC STATE MADE a great fuss about tearing down the old borders drawn by colonial powers. Many groups that otherwise detested ISIS shared the extremists’ distaste for the artificial borders that divided historical neighbors and cobbled together problematic, hard-to-govern entities.

That discussion about viable borders, however, created confusion. Some took the rise of ISIS as evidence that the nation-state itself had entered the final state of eclipse. That view dovetailed with a fascination that grew since the end of the Cold War among some academics and futurists, who believed the global order had transcended the era of states.

In its most breathless incarnation, pop theorists like Parag Khanna celebrated a “nonstate world,” in which states were just one of many players happily competing with free-trade zones, corporations, cities, empires and other levels of organization to maximize utility.

More reserved scholars also concurred that we had entered a post-state era. Some argued that the future held more shared-sovereignty projects, like the European Union, in which states would give up power in exchange for the efficient and humane economies of scale offered by supra-national institutions. Utopian internationalists like Strobe Talbott wrote warmly of a “world government” in which scientific management principles would replace parochial nationalism.

Pessimists agreed that the state was in irreversible decline, but believed something worse would take its place: tribes, militias, unaccountable local strongmen, and predatory companies.

The conflicts since the Cold War point toward a different struggle, between strong and weak states, rather than between states and some mythical nonstate world.

At West Point after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush declared the world had already resolved the struggle against totalitarian ideologies during the 20th century. “America,” Bush said as he unleashed a series of wars that continue 15 years later, “is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”

A case in point is ISIS, which was in fact enamored and obsessed with a very traditional view of power and statehood; their project wasn’t to erase the state, but to invent a new one.

The nation-state is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back just a few hundred years. But states need not be based on nationalism. In fact, the most resilient and powerful states have often stoutly rejected a nationalist identity, instead embracing an identity based on empire (Britain), geographic scale (the United States), or continuous civilization (China).

“The state continues to be the basic building block of politics. Fragile states don’t diminish that fact,” said Alasdair Roberts, incoming director of the school of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Two years ago, Roberts argued that after brief period of uncertainty, the last few decades had shown that states remained the seat of power, in an essay called “The Nation State: Not Dead Yet.”

In the United States, critics of globalization feared that America was surrendering power and sovereignty to organizations like the World Trade Organization. Roberts says that recent developments, especially since the election of Donald Trump, proved what many politicians had said all along: “We’re delegating authority, and if we want to get it back, we can get it back.”

A strong, functional state might subcontract authority to the United Nations, or to an oil company, if such an arrangement suits the state’s interests. But all across the world, in rich countries and poor, states have quickly reclaimed their prerogatives when they believed their national interests were threatened by a trade agreement or an international court decision.

In our times, the Middle East has been the world’s biggest exporter of militants and destabilizing violence.

But the Middle East is not inherently violent or unstable. States have managed to assert authority and control their territory — although sometimes in savory ways — at many points in modern history. Governments in Turkey, Iran, and Arabian Gulf maintain a monopoly of force and a passable piece, ruling ethnically diverse populations (although with limited political rights for citizens). Flashpoints like Syria and Yemen knew stability for many years during the last generation. State-builders like Kemal Ataturk and Gamal Abdel Nasser reversed periods of decline and fragmentation, showing that it’s possible to bring unity and extend the reach of a bureaucratic state even in unruly and poor places.

We are living with the results of failing states in the Arab world. The best alternative is to see them replaced with functional ones. In some cases, that might mean holding our noses and accepting effective but cruel leaders. In others, it will mean exerting pressure and sometimes using force.

It doesn’t work to waffle, as Obama did when he tepidly supported the Arab uprisings in only some countries, and then just as tepidly stood by some of the dictators who mercilessly crushed popular revolts. It also doesn’t work to confuse tyrants who stay in power while eviscerating the state, like Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam in Iraq, with distasteful rulers who maintain a functioning state and are therefore effective, like the Saudi monarchy.

For the United States, a smart policy requires commitment. We know Bashar Assad will never create a sustainably stable government in Syria, because of his determination to wipe out rather than coopt dissent. Iraq is less straightforward; the United States cannot stand by passively as the state breaks up. But that requires clearly choosing sides: openly support Kurdish secession, and division of Iraq into smaller, ethnic or sectarian states, or openly repudiate the Kurdish drive toward independence and put pressure on Baghdad to extend its writ. The current course of intentional ambiguity only promotes the worst alternative — state decline.

When possible, we ought to promote humane governance. But in all cases we must insist on effective state power. We have seen the alternative in Iraq, where the United States and other guarantor powers, including Iran, let the government in Baghdad decay, only intervening when ISIS took control of nearly one-third of the country.

A state that is both cruel and ineffective is an albatross for the whole global order. If we want to counter violent extremism, we’re going to need a world of effective governance — and for now, the only place that’s likely to come from is strong states.

[Published at The Century Foundation.]

This summer, the Islamic State will probably lose its capitals in Syria and Iraq, and possibly, any hope of surviving as a traditional territorial state. For three years, however, the ISIS caliphate functioned as a state—blood-trenched, appalling, and wildly unpopular—but a state nonetheless.

Its fall certainly doesn’t preclude other jihadi movements from replicating Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s feat in the future. And the Islamic State’s material success highlighted just how awful many other governments in the region are. Too often, Middle Eastern states tolerate rampant torture, repression, surveillance, and rights-stripping; the nihilistic horrors and excesses of ISIS weren’t categorically different, but they took these practices to another level.

With the Islamic State downgraded from contender state to insurgency, we now would do well to ask: What is the best long-term antidote to extremist violence?

The answer might lie not in countering violent extremism, but in investing in strong states. And crucially, our experience with state failure and abusive governance in the Middle East should force us to update our definition of a strong state. It is not, as American policy makers have historically believed, a state ruled by a strongman willing to accept phone calls from Washington.

In actuality, a strong state is one that effectively controls its territory and governs its citizens, providing stability and continuity though humane rule and rights for its citizens. Any state that rules through caprice and violence is inherently unstable, even if it possesses a monopoly of force within its borders. Such are the lessons of the failed and failing states of Arab region, whose erosion has allowed violent extremism to flourish. To significantly reduce extremist ranks, it does not suffice to target individuals. A country has to build (or rebuild) an alternative to authoritarian thuggery: a bureaucratic state and security services that actually provide security rather than repress citizens.

Effective governance means humane governance. Anything else is a short-term fix.

Fighting the Wrong War

There are two things that the West, and primarily the United States, must grapple with in order to reverse the jihadi tide that will continue to lap at its shores long after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Caliphate recedes as a grisly but mercifully short chapter in geopolitical history.

First, we need to embrace robust liberal pluralism as our most potent weapon against the ideology of jihadi nihilism, violence, and intolerance. Over the long haul, the West’s openness, prosperity, and education make for better societies than anything on offer from repressive religious extremists or Middle Eastern despots. Not only should we refrain from apologizing for this characteristic; we ought to tout it as the leading edge in our counter-extremism campaign.

Second, we need to admit that our misguided foreign policy and indiscriminate use of violence in the wars against terror since 9/11 have bred a great deal more outrage, extremism, and terror than they have contained. We might not have created the problem, but we have definitively made it worse. We continue to employ the same fruitless “capture, kill, contain” techniques, to our continued disservice. As a result, the cancer that presented as the “caliphate” will in due course metastasize somewhere else.

The prime candidates for the next outbreak of hypertoxic jihadi extremism are places where the United States, or allies with its support, are creating famine, mass displacement, and wantonly killing civilians—while supposedly pursuing extremists, using the hard-to-monitor blunt weapons of aerial bombing, drones, and special forces.

Such battlefields, sadly, exist today in places that only occasionally draw attention, like Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan, and also in more uniformly ignored war zones in places such as Mali and Nigeria. Declining and eroding states have opened the gates to extremists of all sorts in a long list of poorly governed spaces, including parts of the Sinai, Somalia, South Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines.

Embracing Conflict and Despots

By the end of his time in office, President Obama was deploying U.S. special forces simultaneously to 139 countries—that is, two-thirds of all the countries in the world. Not all of those deployments were active conflict zones, but the United States is fighting in undeclared wars in several, including Syria and Yemen. Endless war only serves to weaken states—the very things we need in order to live in a secure world.

The coalition against ISIS relied on nasty alliances of convenience with dictators, authoritarians, and militiamen, many of whom were in thrall to sectarianism and bloodlust. This devil’s bargain is the same principle that guided the Obama administration’s clumsy embrace of the Gulf Cooperation Council monarchs and their war in Yemen, and which drives the Trump administration’s much warmer embrace of Arab despots.

In his debut foreign trip in May, President Trump cast aside any pretense of valuing democracy or decency in our allies. “We must seek partners, not perfection—and to make allies of all who share our goals,” President Trump told the heads of state assembled in Riyadh.

Trump echoed the refrain of the region’s despots, who self-servingly claim that their failing brand of governance is the only alternative to the Islamic State and its imitators.

“Our partnerships will advance security through stability, not through radical disruption,” Trump said. “Wherever possible, we will seek gradual reforms—not sudden intervention.”

History might prove him wrong, but he was only saying out loud a view privately shared by many of his White House predecessors. Iran was the only state singled out for doing anything to promote terrorism, as if state policies adopted by American allies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Egypt, had played no role in abetting violent extremists.

This mistake has become a cornerstone of American foreign policy, repeated over and over again. If unshakeable support for despots provided insurance against runaway violence, today we’d be living in a quiet, peaceful world. It’s not just that devil’s bargains are distasteful and betray our core values; they also don’t work.

Only effective, humanistic states provide an alternative to a governance wasteland that promotes apocalyptic preachers and young people who embrace death in the absence of a sustainable future.

Short-Term Fixes

States in the Middle East and North Africa region are failing. Successful states must exercise their authority over, and elicit loyalty from, a plurality of citizens. Even homogenous states are to a certain degree multiethnic and multisectarian. Difference must be managed, not ignored or suppressed.

Such states have been built before in the Middle East, and have prospered. Even in today’s dark period, there are plenty of states that muster a significant degree of state authority and competence. Egypt, until recently, was an example of how a flawed state could still perform most of its core executive and security functions.

It’s a debatable proposition that authoritarians are the answer. History suggests that sometimes authoritarians can be effective long-term leaders. Their success depends on resources, competence and a commitment to results. Gamal Abdel Nasser was no democratic civil libertarian, but he was genuinely invested in modernizing his country. For decades, he delivered results that seemed to mitigate his authoritarian tendencies. Toward the end of his rule, the balance had shifted—an increasingly erratic and paranoid Nasser presided over a state that stagnated economically and no longer proved capable of securing its borders. Hence a period of domestic paralysis coupled with the catastrophe of the 1967 war.

There are plenty of other examples, ranging from the resurging conflict in southeastern Turkey to flare-ups in rural Tunisia, to suggest that a cloak of stability thrown over incompetent rule and mass repression is only a short-term fix: the simmering violence in every Middle Eastern conflict zone testifies to it.

In the post-colonial Middle East, we mostly see weak states. Policymakers by necessity often focus on the crumbling and collapse, since they cause the biggest problems. But let’s not forget that the reverse is possible. A strong state, an effective state, even a decent state, can be imposed in a country that appears in the grip of anarchy and chaos. It’s happened before and could happen again.

Must a Strong State Be a Just State?

A state that succeeds as a state provides basic security and services. It can be an awful state in many other regards, usually by abusing minorities or withholding political rights, but consolidated states offer continuity, loyalty and a kind of security that’s been in increasingly short supply. (I have written elsewhere about the resilience of the state as the main unit of analysis; here I want to expand on the possibility that only a humane, rights-based state can provide lasting stability.)

The default—the continuing collapse of states in the Middle East—promises more instability. To reverse the poisonous forces ascendant in the Middle East, states must consolidate power and the impose central authority on the full spectrum of militias and political stakeholders. Otherwise, sectarianism, local warlord rule, runaway mafias, and foreign intervention will continue to steer events in places like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

It is possible that a state can succeed without humanism. Saudi Arabia is an excellent test of the proposition. The monarchy offers no pretense of rights, but promises to take good care of its citizens. The most colossal failures in recent times, like Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, and Moammar Qaddhafi, failed not because of their egregious human rights abuses but because they hollowed out the state apparatus and lost physical control. So it’s possible that a well-executed, abominable police state can indefinitely keep the lid on a population. The popular explosions in Iraq, Syria and Libya, however, suggest that brute-force repression is always a temporary solution.

But for a state to truly thrive, it needs to address the basic needs of its people, which include a modicum of political rights. Otherwise they will not be invested in the state which rules them. We need new, better models of governance, which are inclusive and provide genuine political feedback. They need not look just like Western democracies. Nor, however, can they trample their people’s rights. Citizens in the Middle East, like everywhere else in the world, demand decent treatment from their government, and they expect some say over how they’re ruled. They also have a historical memory of times and places when different identity groups coexisted without violence, as well as when political loyalties came with dividends—and not merely with the threat of reprisal against the disloyal.

The long-term recipe for a Middle East free from the scourge of violent extremists is the same as it is everywhere else: effective rule by states both strong and humane, that recognize pluralism, rule of law, and human rights.

COVER PHOTO: TWO MEN CARRY SICK AND INJURED CHILDREN TO SAFETY THROUGH THE RUBBLE OF A STREET IN THE OLD CITY OF MOSUL ON JUNE 24, 2017.  © UNHCR/CENGIZ YAR.

My first foray onto Bloggingheads TV, with fellow TCF fellow Michael Cohen. Michael thinks COIN is “claptrap”; I think it was a decent idea taken too far. We’re both starting our discussion with a read of Fred Kaplan’s book The Insurgents, and our own long-standing argument about what went wrong in Iraq (and our mostly shared view of what went wrong in Afghanistan).

If you watch, you can hear in the background my kids apparently trying to tear down our house, directly upstairs from my head.

BONUS: CROWD-SOURCED TECH HELP? For some reason, I can’t figure out how to embed the video here. When I paste the embed code from BhTV in the post on WordPress, it just leaves the code as is. Any suggestions?

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Fred Kaplan graciously took part in a Twitter conversation about his book, The Insurgents. He explained his concerns that the military remains confused about its mission, and expounded on his view that counterinsurgency doctrine is sometimes the right recipe and is not, as I suggested in a question, “snake oil,” or “the best way to fight a kind of war we should never fight.”

The tweets have been gathered here in what to the horror of those who care about grammar, is called a “storify,” v. trans. “to storify.”

Fred Kaplan’s Insurgents on David Petraeus

The American occupation of Iraq in its early years was a swamp of incompetence and self-delusion. The tales of hubris and reality-denial have already passed into folklore. Recent college graduates were tasked with rigging up a Western-style government. Some renegade military units blasted away at what they called “anti-Iraq Forces,” spurring an inchoate insurgency. Early on, Washington hailed the mess a glorious “mission accomplished.” Meanwhile, a “forgotten war” simmered to the east in Afghanistan. By the low standards of the time, common sense passed for great wisdom. Any American military officer willing to criticize his own tactics and question the viability of the mission brought a welcome breath of fresh air.

Most alarming was the atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty that swirled through the highest levels of America’s war on terror. The Pentagon banned American officers from using the word “insurgency” to describe the nationalist Iraqis who were killing them. The White House decided that if it refused to plan for an occupation, somehow the United States would slide off the hook for running Iraq. Ideas mattered, and many of the most egregious foul-ups of the era stemmed from abstract theories mindlessly applied to the real world.

There is no one better equipped to tell the story of those ideas — and their often hair-raising consequences — than Fred Kaplan, a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter. Kap­lan writes Slate’s War Stories column, a must-read in security circles. He brings genuine expertise to his fine storytelling, with a doctorate from M.I.T., a government career in defense policy in the 1970s and three decades as a journalist. Kaplan knows the military world inside and out; better still, he has historical perspective. With “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War,” he has written an authoritative, gripping and somewhat terrifying account of how the American military approached two major wars in the combustible Islamic world. He tells how it was grudgingly forced to adapt; how it then overreached; and how it now appears determined to discard as much as possible of what it learned and revert to its old ways.

Read the rest in The New York Times [subscription required].

Kelly McEvers has a story on NPR about Moqtada Sadr’s methods; he seems to be borrowing directly from Hezbollah’s playbook, and I discuss in an interview with Kelly all the potential for power and long-term pitfalls Hezbollah’s approach entails.

At a recent press conference, Iraq’s minister of planning, Ali Youssef al-Shukri, stepped to the podium, gave a brief and somber blessing, and announced the issue of the day: a new mechanism for quality control of imports to Iraq.

Shukri spoke softly and wore a pressed suit. The former academic has spent time in the United States, on a State Department program for international leaders. One could hardly guess that he belongs to the party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric best known for fierce battles against U.S. troops during the war and violent threats against the American presence in Iraq that continue today.

Analysts say the planning minister is the new face of Sadr’s party, which now holds 40 out of 325 seats in Iraq’s Parliament. They say Sadr is following in the footsteps of other Islamist groups in the region — namely, Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Remaking a militant group’s image starts with recruiting middle-class technocrats into the party’s ranks, says Thanassis Cambanis, author of A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel.

With Hezbollah, “militants, fighters and ideologues who were leading the party would be happy to assign an obscure dentist or biochemical professor to an important portfolio in Parliament or in the government — if that person could do a better job,” he says. “This lack of ego was a big part of their success.”

It’s a success Cambanis says Sadr hopes to copy. If, say, Iraq’s Planning Ministry can show it’s combating corruption by controlling imports, then the people will continue voting for Sadr’s party.

Read the rest at NPR.

I was cleaning out my office ahead of the New Year, and I found the press badge that the US military issued me in Kuwait in 2003. Just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the military press office (known during that phase of the war as the CFLCC PAO) accredited more than a thousand journalists. Lots were embedding for the invasion, but plenty more of us were operating on our own. We still needed badges to deal with the ubiquitous military.

The spokesman’s office organized sessions to plan how to bring unembedded journalists to the site of the WMD he expected to be discovered. In other ways, too, the flacks were planning ahead for a long slog in Iraq: my accreditation lasted more than a year, through May 2004.

The terminology, though, still makes me laugh — the unwitting sense of humor of the acronym-happy bureaucrats who brought us hits like the quickly discarded “Operation Iraqi Liberation.” America was suffering global recriminations for eschewing allies and multilateral institutions in its march to war. With no apparent trace of irony the military’s public affairs department borrowed the term being flung at the US government by angry critics, and applied it to the reporters who had chosen not to embed: we were “unilateral journalists.” To this day it’s my favorite title I’ve ever earned.

I’m quite honored to find my memoir of the Iraq invasion in At Length on the top 20 list for this year at longform.org. They’ve chosen quite a line-up of pieces, including a bunch I have not yet read but have just put in my Instapaper.

One of my favorite voices on Iraq is Larry Kaplow, the veteran reporter who to my knowledge spent more time in Baghdad than any other Western reporter. He has weighed in today with the kind of droll summation that is his trademark.

“It’s not over yet,” on Foreign Policy, describes the biggest fault lines splitting Iraq and threatening disaster as potently in the Mesopotamian war’s eighth year as it they did in its first. That’s right; Iraq’s quieter, but it’s still at war, as Larry reminds us in his “let’s cut the BS” fashion.

Larry is a tireless reporter and a good friend (we lived a few doors apart in the Hamra hotel for the couple of years I spent in Baghdad). At the height of the sectarian killing in Iraq, Larry liked to remind people that calling the conflict a civil war misleadingly implied that sectarian militias were fighting one another, when in fact, most of the violence entailed militias from one sect killing civilians from another.

Larry was well ensconced in Baghdad months before the American invasion began in March 2003, and he stayed, more or less without interruption, until the fall of 2009. He returned this summer and helped produce one of the most humane (and perversely enjoyable) accounts of what’s happened in Iraq for This American Life. The hour-long show is well worth streaming online or downloading to your iDevice.

On both Foreign Policy and This American Life, Larry is reminding us of the horrifying and still-uncalculated human toll of the Iraq war – and that despite the recent spells of quiet, he’s warning us that there’s still reason to fear.

What is the long arc of America’s involvement in Iraq?

For two very different approaches to this question, take a look at the a Defense Department official’s description of the blueprint for Iraq and Anthony Shadid’s wrenching story of one family’s encounter with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Each in their way is trying to make sense of the seven-year war, giving us a story line to make sense of what’s happened, where Iraq is going, and what it might mean.

On ForeignPolicy.com’s Middle East Channel, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin H. Kahl outlines America’s goals in Iraq for 2011 and beyond. Most interesting are some of the details, like the mention that America’s civilian presence in the long-term will be concentrated in the Kurdish north, and the rhetorical shift from war and occupation to “strategic partnership” and a “train-and-equip” military mission. In Defense Department fashion, the most compelling illustration of the narrative arc comes in these Power Point slides, which show death tolls.

For a sense of what those deaths look and feel like, we can turn to Anthony, who deploys his formidable gifts to tell us the human narrative. He delivers the kind of sweeping, gripping tale that we’ve come to expect from him. In this case, he accompanies a family that is searching for one of its dead five years after his murder and disappearance.

The odyssey contains so much of what defines life in Iraq: fear, death, bureaucracy, sectarian resentment and underlying it all, a deep strain of bewilderment. In one scene, the Sunni family goes to a police station in a Shia area for a document they need in order to obtain a death certificate.

The family needed a letter from the police station, the first step in claiming Muhammad’s death certificate and finding out where he was buried. With Hamid beside her, the mother pleaded to let them inside. For five years they had looked for him, she said.

The policeman glared at her suspiciously. “If you’re lying, I’ll put you all in jail right now,” he shouted.

“My son is dead, and this is what you say to us?” the mother answered.

The policeman turned his head in disgust.

“Dog,” he muttered under his breath.

Slogans litter Baghdad. They are scrawled on the blast walls that partition this city of concrete. They proclaim unity from billboards over traffic snarled at impotent checkpoints. The more they are uttered, it seems, the less resonant they become.

“Respect and be respected,” read the one the family passed, entering the police station.

Read the rest in the Times.

At Length Magazine has just published a short memoir I wrote of the early days of the Iraq invasion. You can find it under prose on the homepage, or you can click here to link directly to the piece. Here’s how it opens:

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you. Fucking American army piece of shit,” Sa’ad al-Azawi chanted behind the wheel of his BMW. He couldn’t recognize his own city, he couldn’t navigate it. He just wanted to hop across the July 14 Bridge to the manicured center of the city’s power, Baghdad’s palm-lined answer to the Washington Mall, soon to be home to the occupation headquarters. A tank blocked an on-ramp. We had to circle west along the Tigris River and then back east again to get to the Rashid Hotel.

Baghdad’s map had become malleable, old routes across town melting away like mercury and reforming in odd places. Americans had closed some roads and bridges with checkpoints. They had cut others with bombs. Buildings were missing in action. Pits of rubble had replaced homes, like an entire block that included a Saddam safe house behind a Mansour restaurant. A bunker buster had buried a three-story house in a pit 20 feet deep.

Along the approach to Baghdad, every hundred yards or less, a killed car askew beside the road — either a rotting driver, shot to death, or a charred car frame from a direct hit on the car by some kind of bomb. (Rocket? RPG? Mortar? So early in the war, I certainly couldn’t tell.) Bullet casings at every intersection, detours around each part of the highway bombed into a moonscape. A bloated dead donkey blocked the bridge across the Tigris in downtown Baghdad. You could date the bodies in the cars and sometimes on the sidewalks by their shape and smell. Within days of death the skin turned black. As they decomposed they bloated to twice their normal size. And they smelled stronger than anything I’ve smelled before, like that rush up the back of your nose from your stomach just before you vomit, and then blooming into something worse.