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      The Guardian view on Iraq, 20 years on: the costs of war | Editorial

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      It did not take long for anyone to realise that the Iraq war was the disaster that many had predicted; not much longer than it took to confirm that it was launched on a lie and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Whatever relief or joy was felt by Iraqis at the fall of Saddam Hussein’s violent and oppressive regime, it was soon subsumed by the horror of what followed. The body count and wider damage have not stopped rising since. When the 10th anniversary arrived, Islamic State (IS), birthed by the war’s fallout, had yet to make its frightening rise to establishing a “caliphate”. Two decades on from the beginning of the war, with the “shock and awe” assault of 19 March 2003, we are still fathoming the impact of the US-led and UK-backed invasion.The toll has been felt most of all, of course, within Iraq itself. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the violence that followed. The Costs of War project estimates that several times as many may have died from knock-on effects. More than 9 million Iraqis were displaced. Thousands of coalition personnel, mostly American, were killed. Trillions of dollars that could have been spent on improving lives were instead squandered destroying them. Much of the Pentagon spending went to just five huge corporations.The catastrophe was compounded by the failure to plan for what came next. Iraqis watched as power stations and national treasures were looted, while American troops guarded the oil ministry and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, glibly dismissed the turmoil: “Freedom’s untidy”. The security vacuum and de-Ba’athification strategy fomented sectarianism not only in Iraq itself, but far beyond its borders – and fuelled terrorism that has proved not only most deadly in the region, but has taken lives in the west, too. Later decisions such as support for Nouri al-Maliki made matters worse.The invasion curtailed hopes of stabilising Afghanistan, by drawing away attention, resources and troops. It strengthened and emboldened Iran. It reinforced North Korea’s conviction that it was essential to acquire and defend WMDs. It hastened the end of the brief unipolar moment and undercut visions of a rules‑based global order. A military adventure conceived by many of its players as a brash reassertion of US supremacy in the wake of the September 11 attacks only weakened and undermined the country – all the more so after the horrors of Abu Ghraib and wider brutality against civilians. Russia and China took note. So did the global south, hindering efforts to garner support for Ukraine. It was hardly the first time America’s foreign policy had clashed with its declared ideals, but it had not been so public and inescapable since Vietnam. Liberal interventionism was badly discredited. The refugee flows produced by regional instability, along with IS-led or -inspired attacks in Europe, contributed to growing ethno-nationalism and fuelled support for Brexit.Iraq currently appears relatively calm. But US troops are still present due to the ongoing battle against IS. Though there is now a government, following a year of deadlock after elections and an outburst of violence in Baghdad, the state remains unable to keep the lights on or provide clean water. Politicians and officials have pocketed billions.More than half of Iraqis are too young to remember life under Saddam Hussein. Some now aspire to a society and government that looks beyond sectarianism and towards a brighter future, as the 2019 Tishreen movement, and the re-emergence of participants in 2021’s elections, showed. Yet the low turnout underscored that others have given up on democracy, thanks to those who boasted that they were bringing it to justify their war. It may be many more years before we fully reckon the effects of the catastrophe unleashed two decades ago. More

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      We Iraqis had survived Saddam Hussein. It was the US invasion that destroyed our lives | Balsam Mustafa

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      Twenty years ago, around this time, the US-led military operation to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime finally seemed inevitable for Iraqis. With it, the idea of leaving started to sink in.By leaving, I do not mean fleeing the country. That was not even an option. After the 1990s Gulf war, and the international sanctions that followed it, Iraqis were isolated from the rest of the world. For many, there was no exit. Leaving meant departing schools, universities or workplaces, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, and moving to relatively safer places within the country, away from the areas targeted by strikes and bombings. But my parents decided to stay at home in Baghdad. “If we were meant to die, it would be better to die at home” – that was our logic.The neighbourhood where I spent my childhood, adolescence and youth turned into a ghost town when most of our neighbours left. It felt empty and lonely, but we thought it was temporary. Everyone would come back when the war was over, and the scary idea of permanently leaving would dissipate, we told ourselves. We did not anticipate the trajectory that Iraq would follow after the invasion. We shared some cautious optimism about a better future despite our mixed emotions towards the war.This optimism evaporated quickly. And we gradually started to realise that, sooner or later, leaving the country would be one of two options for many Iraqis. The other? Keeping silent to avoid repression. Herein lies the biggest contradiction: many of those who had endured the dictatorship, wars and economic sanctions and stayed in Iraq would be forced to leave after Saddam was gone. The Americans and their allies seemed to have a plan to eradicate the Ba’athists rapidly and efficiently, based on lies and disinformation about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Yet they had no plan for, or interest in, rebuilding the country and the state afterwards. “Mission accomplished,” they said in May 2003.The terrible outcome was indisputable. Iraq quickly fell prey to chaos, conflict and instability, experienced an uncountable number of deaths and displacements, and the erosion of health, education and basic services. Behind the statistics, there are untold stories of agony and suffering. The structural and political violence would spill into social and domestic violence, affecting women and children. With every life lost, a whole family is shattered. From day one, the conditions were forming for the emergence of terrorist groups and militias.The same expat politicians who opposed Saddam and the Ba’athists have since established a system that keeps them in power through an ethno-sectarian network of patronage, corruption and militias. Throughout the years, they have resisted change by designing a rigged electoral system that maintains their positions and self-interest, benefiting from the support of the religious leaders and tribal networks.It is now a cliche, but an Iraqi phrase captures a profound new reality: “Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him.” I recall two encounters, pre- and post-2003, that reflect this sense of continuity. Nearly four years before the US-led invasion of Iraq, the head of the university department where I studied threatened to move me to a different department because I refused to join the Ba’athist party. He yelled in my face: “Our seats are for Ba’athists only. You have taken a seat that does not belong to you.” Then, amid the sectarian conflict of 2006-07, I was once ordered by a militiaman to leave the lecture theatre because there was a religious occasion to observe. I was at first hesitant but decided to end the lecture for my students’ safety.The repeated failure to address Iraqis’ concerns has triggered cycles of protests since 2011. Each time, the demonstrations were met with repression. Yet it was what happened in 2018, and later in 2019 in response to the Tishreen uprising, that finally debunked the myth of Iraqi democracy. Young men and women, chanting for their fundamental rights, were met by a lethal state response. More than 600 were killed, and many more were injured, kidnapped, arrested or forcibly disappeared – to the international community’s indifference.As we approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I am reminded that there has been no accountability or justice for the victims and their families. The people abroad and at home responsible for the widespread misery that characterises Iraq are in denial. Meanwhile, the government only recently adopted a series of measures further cracking down on free speech and personal freedoms, resonating increasingly with the authoritarian policies of the Baathist regime.This month, Iraqi politicians and officials met with policymakers, academics, journalists and other representatives from around the world at the 7th Sulaimani Forum, held at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. At the same time, protests erupted in Dhi Qar province, one of the centres of the Tishreen uprising, over water scarcity, echoing the main driver for 2018’s Basra protests.At the forum, the journalist Jane Arraf asked the current Iraq prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, what “reasons” and grounds for hope he could give to young Iraqis so they would stay in the country. In his answer, he did not address the root causes of suffering; he instead acknowledged his government’s inability to provide young people with jobs in the public sector owing to “financial conditions”, and spoke about the “Riyada” (entrepreneurship) initiative for development and employment, via the private sector.Is that it? Will this ensure that Iraqis stay in their country and live with dignity? What about women and children, who remain marginalised in government rhetoric or policies, suffering under the patriarchal norms echoed in laws and legislation?One of the chants of the protesters three years ago was Nureed watan, meaning, we want a homeland – free from foreign interference, whether from the US or Iran. Twenty years after the invasion, Iraqis are still giving their lives for a place to call home.
      Balsam Mustafa is a Leverhulme early career research fellow at the University of Warwick and author of Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives

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      How the Iraq war altered US politics and led to the emergence of Trump

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      Twenty years ago, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski was working as a desk officer in the Pentagon, when she became aware of a secretive new department called the Office of Special Plans.The OSP had been set up to produce the kind of intelligence that the Bush administration wanted to hear, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Kwiatkowski, then age 42, saw first-hand how the disastrous war was confected.“I had this huge faith in my superiors, that they must be there for a reason, they must be wise and strong and all of these fairytale type things, but I came to find out there are very incompetent people in very high positions,” she said.Kwiatkowski, who became a Pentagon whistleblower over the war, is now a farmer, part-time college professor, and occasional political candidate on the libertarian end of the Republican party in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She says she was somewhat cynical about war and politics even before she was seconded to the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department in 2002. But seeing America’s governance subverted up close dramatically deepened her disillusion.“There’s a crisis of faith in this country,” Kwiatkowski said. “As always, when you have these crises of faith you see populist leaders, and the emergence of Trump certainly was a response to a crisis in faith. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next, because Americans have a lot less to be proud of than we think.”On the whole, she believes the experience of the Iraq war has imbued Americans with a healthy scepticism about what they are being told by the establishment – but not nearly enough.“I could go into the Walmart right now and ask everybody about WMD in Iraq and probably three out ten people, maybe more, will swear that it’s all true,” she said. “Our public propaganda in this country is supremely good.”Polling figures over the past two decades suggest that overall attitudes towards foreign policy are fairly stable. When the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans whether “it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs”, 71% supported activism in 2002 and 64% still supported it in 2021.More generally, the Iraq invasion coincided with a collapse in public trust in government which had very briefly recovered from its post-Vietnam slump after the 9/11 attacks. Data from surveys by the Pew Research Centre, show the post-Iraq malaise is deeper and more enduring.“It said first and foremost to young people that the government can’t be trusted,” John Zogby, another US pollster, said. “It also said that the American military may be the strongest in the world but it has serious limits, and it can’t impose its will, even on smaller countries.”He added: “Americans will go to war, but they want their wars to be short, and they want them to make a positive difference.”There are still US soldiers on counter-terrorist missions in Iraq and Syria. The Authorisation to Use Military Force that Congress first granted to the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2003 invasion has yet to be repealed by the Senate, and has been cited by the Obama and Trump administrations in justifying operations in the region.Coleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower who exposed security lapses leading to the 9/11 attacks, wrote an open letter to the FBI director in March 2003, warning of a “flood of terrorism” resulting from the Iraq invasion. She says now that two decades on, nobody has been held accountable for the fatal mistakes.“I think the real danger is that their propaganda was very successful, and people like Bush and Cheney have now been rehabilitated,” Rowley said. “Even the liberals have embraced Bush and Cheney.”The terrible mistakes made leading to and during the Iraq war forced no resignations and neither George W Bush nor his vice-president, Dick Cheney – nor any other senior official who made the case the war and then oversaw a disastrous occupation – have ever been held to account by any form of commission or tribunal.However, the taint of Iraq arguably altered the course of US politics by hobbling those who supported it.“In some ways you can argue Iraq is what led to Obama being president as opposed to Hillary Clinton,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy at Tufts University. “I don’t think Obama wins the 2008 Democratic primary if Hillary hadn’t supported the war.”The war also opened a schism in the Republican party, strengthening an anti-intervention faction that eventually triumphed with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.George W Bush and his former vice-president have drawn some positive liberal press for their low-key opposition to some of the excesses of the Trump era, but Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East and military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, they paid a political price by becoming marginalised within their own party.“The system has punished those people. If you were a Bushie, if you were a neocon, you’re no longer welcome to the party,” Pollack said. “I would say there has been a lot of accountability, but it’s been accountability in a traditionally American way.”Those excluded included traditional conservatives with less extreme domestic social positions than Maga Republicans. The drive to war was fueled by partisanship – the Bush administration was contemptuous of Democrats and all opposition – but it also served as an accelerant to the extremism that led to Trump and the 6 January insurrection.“It’s very hard to say how much Iraq was responsible for that, but it does seem to me that it was an important element in making our partisanship worse,” Pollack said.Pollack is a former CIA analyst and a Democrat who backed the invasion, believing the evidence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD and supporting the humanitarian argument for ousting a dictator.Pollack jokes that he is the only person to have since apologised. It is not entirely true as a few other pundits, like the conservative commentator, Max Boot, have also been contrite, but there have been no public expressions of remorse from former senior officials who took the fateful decisions. It is one of the important ways in which the US has still not had a proper reckoning for the war.Pollack, who has stayed in touch with several of the Bush team for a forthcoming book on the US and Iraq, said that some express private regret for specific decisions and choices, but others remain unrepentant.“I’ve heard it said to my face that: ‘Nope, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do everything all over again the exact same way’, which I find shocking,” he said. “I don’t see how you look at American behaviour during this period and not have regrets.” More

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      The Iraq War started the post-truth era. And America is to blame | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      This month marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. While, tragically, there are almost too many victims to tally from this criminal act of America’s making, the notion of truth must certainly count as primary among them.We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. By 2.40pm on 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden).Days later, on 14 September, President Bush had his first post-9/11 phone call with Tony Blair, the UK prime minister. According to Bruce Riedel, who was present at the call as a member of Bush’s national security council, Bush told Blair about his plans to “hit” Iraq soon. “Blair was audibly taken aback,” Riedel remembers. “He pressed Bush for evidence of Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 attack and to al-Qaida. Of course, there was none, which British intelligence knew.”American intelligence also knew there was no connection, but that didn’t stop the administration from concocting its own truth out of blood and thin air, so determined were they to invade Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US had captured a man, Ibn al Shaikh al-Libi, whom they suspected of high-level al-Qaida ties. The US flew their captive in a sealed coffin to Egypt, where the Egyptians tortured him into stating that Iraq supported al-Qaida and was assisting with chemical and biological weapons.This was a confession extracted under torture, and therefore – as the Senate select committee on intelligence’s 2014 “Torture Report” points out – fundamentally unreliable. Al-Libi later recanted his statement, the report explained, saying that he had simply told his torturers “what he assessed they wanted to hear”, Regardless, the information, which US intelligence believed was false on its face, made its way into Colin Powell’s speech before the UN security council in February 2003.In other words, it was all lies, lies and more lies. In the two years following 9/11, Bush and his top officials publicly uttered at least 935 lies about the threat that Saddam posed to the United States, according to the Center for Public Integrity. In the run-up to war, Bush & associates flooded the airwaves with the talking point “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” so often that it began to sound like a jingle from a cheap law firm commercial. Needless to say, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.Bush succeeded at the time because the public, primed to be afraid, was susceptible to his lies and the American media was pliable. The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies with, well, let’s call it questionable professionalism.By 2004, the paper was issuing its own mea culpa, admitting it had misled readers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and more, because accounts by anti-Saddam exiles “were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq”.In all its agonized self-reflection, the Times’ editorial somehow managed to blame foreign exiles above the US government or even the Times. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the editorial said. “So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.”This, you might say, is old news. Why should it matter today? For one thing, the US-led invasion not only destroyed Iraq, but it displaced some 9 million people, killed at least 300,000 civilians by direct violence, and devastated Iraq’s already precarious environment. Over 4,400 Americans were also killed and close to 32,000 have been wounded in action in Iraq alone.The invasion also destabilized the region and is certainly a leading cause for today’s global migration crisis. Brown University’s Costs of War project notes that the number of people displaced by all of the US’s post-9/11 wars, at least 38 million people, “exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II”.The Iraq war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stood on the White House lawn in 2017 and told NBC’s Chuck Todd about “alternative facts”, far prior to Donald Trump exploiting the term “fake news”, and much before a current lawsuit revealed the nefarious coordination of a rightwing media empire and a lying government, we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.Of course, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. (Which was probably when politicians were also invented.) And Bush is hardly the first US president to march the country into war based on a lie. Goaded on by the media baron William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley led the US into the Spanish-American war on a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie.But the difference, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, was how the apparatus of lying became institutionalized in our government and abetted by our media: if you don’t like the information that your own intelligence agencies are providing, simply create your own agency, the office of special plans. By the time Bush left office, US troops may have begun to leave Iraq’s major cities, but the larger “war on terror” had truly become a way of life.The world is still reeling from the consequences of these lies and the institutions built on them. In the US, they continue to corrode our politics. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are overrepresented in far-right movements in this country. Public trust in government is near an all-time low, having fallen precipitously during the Bush years. And social media companies have taken up the mantle of amplifying the lies our politicians tell.Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the misbegotten war continues to degrade our national political life. This may be a hard reality to confront, but it’s also the truth.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      Iraqi Parliament Approves New Government After Yearlong Delay

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      The installation of a new prime minister and cabinet ends a long-running political deadlock, but perpetuates a system plagued by corruption and dysfunction.Iraq’s Parliament approved a new government on Thursday that was more than a year in the making but that perpetuates an almost two-decade-old political system that has been blamed for endemic corruption and dysfunction since being ushered in after the U.S.-led invasion.The new prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, presented his list of cabinet ministers to Parliament more than a year after elections last October that were meant to produce a new, reformist government in response to sweeping protests.The new government embodies a system put in place after the 2003 invasion, which allots key roles for specific sects and ethnic groups, and allocates government ministries to the most powerful political parties, which have routinely used those ministries to enrich themselves.The parties once again negotiated among themselves to divide up important posts, and once again Nouri al-Maliki, a former prime minister, played a prominent role in the process. Lawmakers approved Mr. Sudani and his cabinet choices in a closed session.The new cabinet retains the Kurdish politician Fuad Hussein as foreign minister but replaces 16 of the 21 cabinet members named so far. At least two positions were left unfilled, including for the environment ministry, which would have a key role in combating climate change.The influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi nationalist who has resisted Iranian influence, emerged from elections last year with the biggest single bloc in Parliament. But after months of negotiations failed to form a coalition government, he ordered the resignation of his 73 members and in August announced he was withdrawing entirely from politics.Mr. Sadr’s withdrawal opened the way for a rival political bloc made up mostly of Iran-backed Shiite parties to take control in a coalition with Kurdish and Sunni political parties. The bloc includes Mr. Sadr’s archrival, Mr. Maliki, who was backed by the United States in his first term as prime minister, and was blamed in his second term for sectarian policies that fueled the rise of the Islamic State.Nouri al-Maliki, a former prime minister, has remained a power broker within the Iraqi government.Hadi Mizban/Associated PressParliament earlier this month elected Abdul Latif Rashid as president, as part of a power-sharing agreement among the parties to make Mr. Sudani, a former human rights and labor minister, the new prime minister. That voting took place just after rockets targeted the green zone and central Baghdad, in a sign of Iraq’s continued security instability.On Thursday, as he presented his cabinet nominees to Parliament, Mr. Sudani pledged to fight corruption that has devastated the country, work to repair ties with the government of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, and build an economy that would create jobs and improve public services.“Corruption that has affected all aspects of life is more deadly than the corona pandemic and has been the cause of many economic problems, weakening the state’s authority, increasing poverty, unemployment and poor public services,” he told Parliament. He did not set out specific measures his government planned to take.Iraq has become one of the most corrupt and nontransparent countries in the world, according to independent watchdog groups. In the most recent scandal, $2.5 billion has gone missing from government funds in a scheme involving tax checks issued to companies submitting fake documents. The Interior Ministry this week said it had arrested a key suspect as he tried to flee the country.The endemic corruption and lack of basic public services and jobs sparked protests three years ago that led to the resignation of the government and the holding of early elections last year. Security forces that included Iran-backed militia fighters responded to the protests by killing hundreds of unarmed demonstrators.In Parliament on Thursday, one of the political leaders to emerge from the protest movement, Alaa al-Rikabi, was ejected from the session for disrupting proceedings by objecting to the system by which the ministers were chosen.Some analysts said Mr. Sudani stood little chance of carrying out the sweeping reforms he promised on Thursday.A photo released by the Iraqi government shows Parliament Speaker Muhammad al-Halbousi on Thursday announcing the vote approving Iraq’s new government.Iraqi Parliament“At the end of the day, even if he’s 100 percent committed to fighting corruption, his constituency is not the Iraqis calling for anti-corruption, his constituency is the parties that put him in power,” said Renad Mansour, director of the Iraq Initiative program at Chatham House, a policy research center.Sajad Jiyad, an Iraq-based fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the cabinet, with some technocrats among the political appointees, might find it easier than the previous government to enact programs.Mr. Sudani, a former mayor and provincial governor in southern Iraq before he entered federal politics, is an experienced politician and a former member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa party. Every previous prime minister since the U.S. invasion had lived in exile when Saddam Hussein held power and then had returned after he was toppled, but Mr. Sudani remained in Iraq.His predecessor as prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is a former intelligence chief who took office in 2020 with a pledge to hold early elections, which took place last year. Mr. Sudani said he would also aim to hold elections within the next year.Although Mr. Sadr is not in government, he remains a potent political force with the power to mobilize supporters in the streets and create instability for any government. He has been clear that he expects early elections.“Having elections within a year is ambitious and obviously unlikely to happen, but I think that condition is in there as a way of placating Sadr,” said Mr. Jiyad.Nermeen al-Mufti and More

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      Iraq’s Instability Deepens Amid Political Paralysis and Clashes

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      BAGHDAD — On most days in the Iraqi capital, jackhammers and electric drills provide the soundtrack to a construction boom, with multistory restaurants taking shape and a new $800 million central bank building rising above the skyline.But this apparent prosperity in parts of Baghdad belies what many Iraqi officials and citizens see as the crumbling foundation of the state — an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that the United States had intended to be free and democratic when it led an invasion 19 years ago to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein.After the invasion, Iraq’s long-sidelined Shiite Muslim majority came to dominate government, and the power struggle between Shiite and Sunni political groups fueled a sectarian war. Now, in a dangerous threat to the country’s already tenuous stability, rival Shiite armed groups, the most powerful among them tied to neighboring Iran, are fighting each other, and are beyond the control of the central government.“Internally, externally, at the political level and at the security level, Iraq is now a failed state,” said Saad Eskander, an Iraqi historian. “The Iraqi state cannot project its authority over its territory or its people.”A street in an impoverished neighborhood of Baghdad, where many live below the poverty line and do not have access to enough clean water or government-supplied electricity.Sleeping through the midday heat in Baghdad.Iraq’s weaknesses once again came into sharp relief last week when a stalemate over forming a new government — almost a year after the last elections — exploded into violence in the heart of the capital.Followers of the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the heavily guarded Green Zone in an antigovernment protest after Mr. Sadr announced he was withdrawing from politics. Then rival pro-Iranian Shiite paramilitary fighters on the public payroll began shooting at the protesters, and armed members of a Sadr militia emerged to fight them.Ordered by the prime minister not to shoot at the demonstrators, government security forces were largely sidelined while the rival militias fought it out. After two days of fighting killed 34 people, Mr. Sadr ordered his followers to withdraw from the Green Zone, restoring an uneasy calm.The violence was rooted in a stalemate over forming a government that has dragged on since the elections in October 2021.Mr. Sadr’s followers won the largest bloc of seats in Parliament, although that was not enough to form a government without coalition partners. When he failed to put together a ruling coalition, the major Iran-backed parties with paramilitary wings — Shiite political rivals to Mr. Sadr — stepped in and tried to sideline him.Mr. Sadr then turned to his power on the street rather than at the negotiating table, ordering his followers to set up a protest camp at Parliament — a tactic he has used in the past.“If we discuss post-2003 Iraq, then we have to say it has never actually been a functioning state,” said Maria Fantappie of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Swiss-based conflict management organization. “We never had a prime minister with total control of the security forces or the borders.”Relatives of patients await news at a Baghdad hospital that treats poorer communities.Muhammed Said Jihad received oxygen while his cousin watched over him at a Baghdad hospital.That Iraq has not collapsed is thanks largely to the country’s immense oil wealth. But most citizens never see the benefit of that wealth, suffering through daily electricity cuts, decrepit schools and a lack of health care or even clean water.Last month, the country’s respected finance minister, Ali Allawi, resigned with a stark warning that staggering levels of corruption were draining Iraqi resources and posed an existential threat.“Vast underground networks of senior officials, corrupt businessmen and politicians operate in the shadows to dominate entire sectors of the economy and siphon off literally billions of dollars from the public purse,” Mr. Allawi wrote in his resignation letter to the prime minister. “This vast octopus of corruption and deceit has reached into every sector of the country’s economy and institutions: It must be dismantled at all costs if this country is to survive.”Mr. Allawi, who also served as finance minister in 2006, said he was shocked when he returned at “how far the machinery of government had deteriorated” under the domination of special interest groups tied to various countries in the region.“You have the people who fly off to Tehran, fly off to Amman, fly off to Ankara, fly off to the U.A.E., fly off to Qatar,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in June. “Before, they used to fly off to Washington, but they don’t do that anymore.”A garbage truck dumping trash in a Baghdad area that is home to generations of Iraqis who migrated from the south seeking better prospects. A street vendor fixing a fan for a customer in Baghdad.The United States, meanwhile, has increasingly disengaged from the Arab world, focusing mainly on containing Iran and fostering normalization with Israel. For years the target of hostility over its occupation of Iraq, the country now appears to be losing relevance as Shiite militias battle it out for primacy.Iraq sits on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, and oil revenues have both fed corruption and propped up the economy.According to state and local officials, militias and tribal groups siphon off customs revenue from Iraq’s Gulf port of Umm Qasr. Crossings along the 1,000-mile border with Iran are another source of illicit revenue. Iran-backed militias in Iraq control sectors like scrap metal, and they extort payments for protection from businesses.Government contracts are another major source of corruption.Iraq’s health ministry, traditionally run by officials loyal to Mr. Sadr, is the monopoly buyer of almost half the medications imported into Iraq and is considered one of the most corrupt ministries, according to Iraqi officials and outside experts.Three years ago, Ala Alwan, a former World Health Organization official, resigned as health minister, saying he could no longer fight corruption in the ministry or ward off threats.Mr. Allawi, in the interview in June when he was still finance minister, described a country that had essentially become ungovernable.“You can’t do anything but manage daily affairs, given that in this country, there’s a crisis every day,” he said.Baghdad residents on a city bus. Iraq has one of the youngest populations in the Middle East, and there are fears that the economy will not be able to support them.Medical waste flowing into the Tigris River near a hospital in Baghdad.With the war in Ukraine driving up oil prices state revenue has recently come from oil exports — a lack of diversification that could prove disastrous as the world increasingly turns to alternative energy sources.But with dysfunctional ministries and a weak central government, there is no real effort to improve public services or life for the one-quarter of the population estimated by the government to live in poverty.Large parts of the country suffer from shortages of electricity or clean water — a continuing crisis that fueled widespread protests three years ago, leading to the fall of the government.Few sectors are as blatantly dysfunctional as the country’s once-respected educational system. For almost seven years, thousands of temporary teachers have worked without pay, waiting for a chance to be hired by the education ministry. The ministry has now begun making payments.Schools are so overcrowded they operate in shifts, offering only half a day of classes to students. Many schools lack running water or enough toilets. Most are lucky if they have fans in the 100-degree heat.More than half of Iraqi students drop out before high school. In Baghdad and other cities, children who have left school push wooden carts in outdoor markets or hawk bottles of water to drivers in traffic.Relatives of patients lining up to collect prescriptions at a Baghdad hospital.A classroom for trainee doctors at a Baghdad hospital.“We didn’t receive new textbooks this year,” said Um Zahra, a primary schoolteacher who was doing paperwork at the education ministry this week. “We are trying to use old ones,” she added, saying she did not want to give her full name because she did not have her husband’s permission to speak.Um Zahra said her own neighborhood in Baghdad, the second biggest city in the Middle East, had not had regular running water since 2014.There is so little faith in the political system that in Baghdad, voter turnout was about 30 percent in the last elections. Many expect the same corrupt politicians to remain in power thanks to a post-2003 system that ensures key posts for specific religious and ethnic groups.With neighboring Iran and Turkey both frequently breaching Iraqi sovereignty, the weakness of the Iraqi government and state institutions poses a threat to regional stability — as it did in 2014 when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an Islamic State assault that conquered large parts of the country.Mr. Eskander, the historian, said Iraq’s instability can be traced back to before Saddam was toppled, when it lost control of some of its borders and territory in the Iran-Iraq war. But he said he still had hope that the country would survive.“A change of leaders — a change of generations — is the only way,” Mr. Eskander said.Open sewage in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad. More