Introduction

The Theoretical Framework

The nexus of administrative structures, organisations, laws, customs, and ideas are at the heart of economic transactions. They directly affect transaction costs and impinge on the efficiency of markets.

The formal rules of a society (laws and regulations), informal constraints (conventions and codes of conduct), and the enforcement mechanisms of both are the boundaries inside which human beings interact.

Administrative structures and formal rules are then expressed through organisations that include political bodies, economic units, social and religious bodies, and educational institutions.
​
In my view, based on personal experience in multilateral institutions, private business and government, these structures are one of the key determinants of economic growth and development.

Since 2019, the Iraq protest movement, dubbed the “Tishreen (October) Revolution,” has revealed the lengths to which both state and non-state actors are willing to silence dissent and free speech. Iraqi activists and protestors have been subjected to vicious and persistent hate speech campaigns, both online and offline, that aim to discredit them and the movement. Iran-affiliated militias and media outlets have been using the term “jokers” as a label to delegitimize activists and protestors, falsely accusing them of being foreign agents hellbent on destruction. As the protest movement gained widespread support despite such efforts to silence it, Adel Abdul Mahdi’s then-government enforced a series of internet blackouts to prevent online coverage. Nevertheless, activists persisted. All throughout, policing Iraqi voices and bodies has become a way of governance, through both legislative and physical suppression. 

Physical repression

While Iraq has witnessed protests on an annual basis for over a decade, protests erupting throughout the country in early October 2019 were the most expansive and gained widespread support from professional guilds, academic unions, and student bodies. While protests initially erupted in the Shia-majority center and south of the country (where protesters are more organized and experienced), they were followed by protests in the Kurdish Region and Sunni-majority governorates, where local security forces swiftly arrested activists. Thousands of protestors filled public squares and blocked roads in their cities to peacefully demonstrate. In the following months, violence against protestors and journalists covering the demonstrations was common practice. In addition to live ammunition and rubber bullets, state forces fired tear gas canisters directly at protesters, killing many. Gruesome videos of dead protestors with tear gas grenades permeating their skulls circulated on the internet. Among those killed was prominent Baghdad activist Safaa’ al-Sarray. In a matter of months, state security forces—primarily riot police—and paramilitaries’ snipers killed over 700 protestors, and injured over 20,000, permanently handicapping dozens. Numbers have continued to rise since, and as of March 2021, 1,035 protestors are reported to have been killed, and 26,300 injured. Meanwhile in the Kurdish Region of Iraq, Kurdish security forces killed at least six protestors and arrested 400 in December 2020. 
​
As state and non-state forces continue to target protestors with systemic, fatal violence, enforced disappearances—a longstanding tactic—have also been weaponized. According to the International Commission on Missing Persons, somewhere between 250,000 to one million Iraqis have been forcibly disappeared since 2003. Among the most notable abduction was that of 150 academics and staff at the Ministry of Higher Education in November 2006. Rounded up by armed men and loaded onto trucks, most have not been seen since. Enforced disappearances have long been weaponized by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other militant groups in Iraq to silence critics, dissenters, and other citizens for their ethnoconfessional identities. Iraq’s recent governments have been doing the same. Despite calls from human rights organizations on this matter, there has been no progress. Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights cites around 7,663 enforced disappearances in the past three years alone. Enforced disappearances have particularly become a weapon of choice for militias and state institutions to silence protestors and activists since October 2019. In recent months, many activists and protestors have gone missing, likely in secret prisons. Among the most notable disappearances are those of Sajjad al-Iraqi, Abdul Masih Romeo Sarkees, and Ali Jaseb Hattab. The later assassination of Hattab’s father, who was vocal in his search for him, sent a resounding and terrorizing message to silence all missing persons’ families.

ENOUGH ALREADY: TIME TO END THE WAR ON TERRORISM

​Last month Foreign Affairs ran an article saying that Iran and Israel were engaged in mutual hostilities that could drag the United States into a war not of our choosing, and there was no mention in the article of the people who really do want the U.S. to go to war with Iran, the neoconservative branch of the Israel lobby. Last week Foreign Policy ran an article by one of those neoconservatives, saying that if the U.S. returns to its deal with a “rogue regime committed to Israel’s destruction,” Israel will likely go to war against Iran.

It ought to be terrifying that our supposed client state is escalating its attacks on Iran just as the United States is trying to reenter the Iran deal; and its friends in the U.S. are escalating the war of words. But the most you hear about this on mainstream media is Andrea Mitchell venturing to Jake Sullivan that Israel “is being unhelpful” to the United States with its attacks.

It’s as if the Iraq war and the neoconservative/Israel lobby role in pushing that invasion has disappeared down the memory hole.

That’s what makes Scott Horton’s new book such essential reading. “Enough Already” is the radio host/libertarian/antiwar.com editor’s meticulous analysis of how the U.S. “war on terrorism” has generated unending suffering in the Middle East. A million lives lost in Bush’s war on Iraq alone, as Horton said during the Israel lobby conference April 24.

Years of of lethal state failure have devastated the people of Iraq, whose daily life today is fraught with challenges, with little hope in sight

​Ramadan is drawing to an end. In Baghdad, imams lead pious worshippers for Taraweeh prayers in the evening. The recitation of dua echoes across neighbourhoods like a chorus of pleading voices ascending to the heavens above.

Iraq is a wounded nation still wading through the murky waters of adversity.

Around sunset, just before families gather for the iftar meal to break their fast, the city’s destitute come wandering, going from door to door. They are mostly children who lost parents in one of the many days of blood that have soaked Iraq’s calendar since 2003.

They are pale and hungry, and there are so many of them, almost everywhere.

The arrest and conviction of journalists and activists has revived concerns over a government dominated by two clans

The nightmare began for Sherwan Sherwani when six police cars pulled up outside his family home on the outskirts of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region. At least 10 officers stormed the house and chased the 38-year-old freelance journalist upstairs, eventually pinning him down with a gun to his head. The arrested man was later accused by the region’s prime minister of espionage.

His wife, Rugash Izzadin Muhaeiddin, who witnessed the October 7 arrest alongside two of their children aged eight and 12, describes it as “terrifying and brutal”. She says she knew her husband had a dangerous job. For nearly 15 years he had written articles criticising the Kurdistan Regional Government, which holds semi-autonomous rule over Iraq’s majority Kurdish territories.

He had brushed off earlier pleas from his wife to stop writing. And ignored his family’s traditional support for the ruling Kurdistan Democratic party — controlled by the powerful Barzani family — to continue reporting on anti-government protests, alleged human rights abuses and land grabs by officials. “[The authorities] had been accumulating what they call these crimes, [his criticism], for a long time,” says Muhaeiddin, an economics teacher.

​Sherwani was one of five people from north-west Iraqi Kurdistan to be rounded up and arrested in October. What they had in common was their involvement in either organising or reporting on anti-government protests over unpaid public sector wages in 2020. All were later charged with threatening national security. A week before their trial opened in February, Masrour Barzani, KRG prime minister, told reporters that the detainees were “neither activists nor journalists. Some of them were spies, they spied for other countries”.​

These groups are undermining efforts to improve Erbil-Baghdad relations and reestablish security in the north.

​On April 15, a drone laden with explosives targeted military facilities hosting US troops in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), but resulted in no casualties. On the same day, rocket fire on a Turkish military base in Mosul’s Bashiqa region killed one Turkish solider.

The attacks, attributed to pro-Iran factions based in Iraq, have been widely seen in the context of the US-Iran and Turkey-Iran rivalries in the region. However, such analysis ignores an important development linked to these incidents: the attempt of Iranian-backed paramilitaries in northern Iraq to consolidate their power in territories disputed between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

The presence and growing strength of these groups have profound implications not only for the future of Baghdad-Erbil relations, but also for inter- and intra-communal relations in these ethnically-diverse regions. Since their arrival, Iran-backed paramilitaries have transformed the nature of the dispute over these territories from a conflict between two governments, to a very complex situation characterised by deep militarisation of ethno-religious and sectarian identities in Nineveh and Kirkuk governorates.

The Biden administration’s plans are in place to (mostly) end the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan. But don’t expect a conclusion to the 18-year war in Iraq any time soon.
​
“We’re going to stay in Iraq,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told Military Times for a report published in April, supplying four rationales for that choice: the Islamic State, Iran, Baghdad and Afghanistan. Each excuse was as wrongheaded as the last, and none justify prolonging the heir-apparent to the notorious title of America’s longest war.

“We’re going to be there, our NATO partners are going to be there,” McKenzie first said, “to finish the ISIS fight.” What exactly does that mean? The mission to reclaim territory from ISIS in Iraq has been completed for nearly four years. It is also complete in Syria, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed himself during a U.S. raid in 2019. The Islamic State’s “ability to reemerge is extremely low right now,” Lt. Gen. Paul Calvert, who leads the U.S.-led coalition fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told Defense One in March.

Though Calvert also noted that could change, the same can be said of any of the many extremist militant groups in the Middle East that are enemies of the United States but pose only a limited threat — certainly not a threat that justifies ongoing occupation of Iraq. The idea that we will “finish the ISIS fight” in the sense McKenzie seems to envision (eliminating all remnants of the group by military means) is wildly unrealistic. It is also unnecessary for U.S. security, which is to say, endlessly pursuing ISIS stragglers is no reason to stay in Iraq.