Iraq’s Last Chance

Beginning of a New York Times guest editorial, August 15, by Ali Khedery, special assistant to five American ambassadors to Iraq

“The country is in your hands,” whispered Iraq’s president, Fuad Masum, on August 11 as he charged the newly designated prime minister, Haider al-abaci (pictured here), with forming a cabinet. “May God help you,” another lawmaker added. Indeed, after last week’s sidelining of the country’s long-serving prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Mr. Abadi will need all the divine intervention he can get if Iraq is to be spared a descent into all-out civil war.

I was involved in the formation of all five of Iraq’s governments between 2003 and 2010, and I know that the coming weeks will be decisive, turbulent and violent, as leaders from all factions jockey for both power and money – to help represent their respective communities and to siphon away billions of government dollars through systemic patronage.

After spending more than $1 trillion and losing some 4,500 soldiers’ lives, American politicians cannot dare reveal a dirty little secret: Iraq has since 2003 devolved into a combination of Lebanon and Nigeria – a toxic brew of sectarian politics and oil-fueled kleptocracy. The combination of religious rivalry and endemic corruption has hollowed out the Iraqi government, as evidenced by the country’s ongoing electricity crisis and the collapse of entire Iraqi Army divisions in the face of an advance by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, into Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, even though the Iraqi troops vastly outnumbered the militants.

Over the past century, Iraq has suffered from regional wars, British colonialism, numerous coups, disastrous invasions of its neighbors Iran and Kuwait, international sanctions, an American military occupation and nearly four decades of misrule by Saddam Hussein and Mr. Maliki.

Once the capital of Arab culture, philosophy and commerce, Iraq is today an international pariah and incubator of transnational terrorism, where regional actors are engaged in a bloody proxy war that threatens to spill across borders and destabilize the entire region.

Mr. Abadi has inherited a country on the verge of collapse. Whether Iraq will shatter or be salvaged is not in his hands alone. It will depend on a dizzying number of other leaders, political parties, non-state actors, and neighboring and global powers.