Canada's assessments of U.S. policy, Iraq's weapons capabilities, regional implications of an invasion and resulting instability proved to be generally on the mark

A new research paper says Canadian intelligence assessments on Iraq were generally accurate in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 — unlike reports produced in Washington and London that were used to justify war.

Almost nothing has been said outside government circles about Canadian judgments that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons of mass destruction program, the paper says — partly to avoid embarrassing American and British counterparts.

“Canada’s intelligence assessments on Iraq in 2002 and 2003 subsequently turned out to be largely correct, while the analysis of most other countries on key Iraq issues — as far as is publicly known — was flawed,” concludes the paper, recently published in the journal Intelligence and National Security.

In the streets of Baghdad, Iraqis battle a corrupt political class, war, poverty, and now a pandemic that has ravaged an ailing health sector.

​On Baghdad’s al-Rashid street, stalls, tea houses and restaurants serve unmasked customers in crammed markets in spite of COVID-19 rapidly spreading among the populace. This busy street in Baghdad is a testament to pre-existing governance failure that has been felt in many developing countries reeling from the impact of COVID-19 on their economies.

Nearby at al-Rusafi Square, exhausted porters pulling back-breaking cargo intersect in a cobweb of traffic threads under the scorching sun of Iraq’s merciless summer. A horse on a leash looks on as drivers of taxis-turned-buses yell for the last passenger to fill an empty seat. Honking mingles with a stream of slurs spouted off by an angry driver who wants through, but cannot. A daily repertoire of mayhem plays on, and the din resonates across the square where car bombs incinerated many humans in recent years.
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People most vulnerable to poverty are presented with no alternatives encouraging them to stay indoors. The absence of financial support is pushing them to resume their labor in risky environments. While easing movement restrictions enables daily workers to provide for their families, authorities have not provided any mobile health awareness teams in packed markets, nor arranged the distribution of increasingly-expensive face masks.

​Assassinations of two activists in less than a week seen as targeted

Iraqi activists in the southern city of Basra have been targeted in a string of killings and attempted assassinations, with two young organisers gunned down in less than a week.

Rogue militia groups are widely suspected by analysts and activists of being responsible. The killings threaten to undermine new Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who has pledged to rein in militias acting outside state control and to protect protesters who have been demanding reforms over the past year.

After Mr Kadhimi took office in May, the authorities arrested a small group suspected of being responsible for assaults on protesters in Basra. A month later, security forces detained members of one of the most prominent Iran-backed militias. But the men were subsequently released. And in July, Hisham al-Hashemi, a close adviser to the prime minister, was shot dead in Baghdad in an incident which many suspected to be retaliation. 

An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

PART I
​A GLOBAL THREAT EMERGES
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
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The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

What was once an autocracy has become a kleptocracy, a 'giant graft scheme' with protesters ever in the streets.

​Last week, the New York Times published one of its finest pieces of reporting this year. Written by Robert F. Worth, it’s an autopsy of post-Saddam Iraq, where the autocracy of the Baathist regime has given way to a kleptocracy in which “literally everything is for sale.” Worth depicts an Iraq that’s essentially a giant graft scheme, with elites cashing out while everyone else scrounges for scraps. Construction projects meant to create new community spaces or just fix up the local mosque sit half-finished, their funding either stolen or bottled up in disputes. Thuggish militias threaten violence to land lucrative contracts and establish monopolies.

All of this is made possible, naturally, by Uncle Sam. Every month, the Federal Reserve of New York, where the Iraqi government has an account, ships hefty sums of dollars to Baghdad. This cash is then ostensibly auctioned off to Iraqi banks, which are supposed to then lend it out. Instead the auction acts as a banquet for thieves and fraudsters, who have even created fake banks in order to launder money. And the corruption isn’t just limited to the financial system. The root of the problem is Iraq’s parliament, which, after every election, allows the winning parties to divvy up an ever-expanding number of civil service jobs. This is the linchpin of the graft: powerful positions are filled with cronies who then enable contract corruption and kickbacks, greased by pilfered dollars and enforced by militias.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi is set to visit Washington soon, although he does not yet have a date or an invitation, so he is scrambling to say all the right things in order to secure a meeting with US President Donald Trump.

Iraq is worse off than it was two weeks ago and this last week has propelled two items to the top of the list for Al-Kadhimi’s visit to the US: Kata’ib Hezbollah’s continued attacks on the US and Iraqis, and calls by Al-Kadhimi for early elections that Kata’ib Hezbollah and its allies in Iraq’s Council of Representatives won’t allow to happen. 

The top agenda item for Trump is for Al-Kadhimi to do something about the militias that he supposedly commands as Iraq’s commander in chief. The militias that fall under the government’s security apparatus are attacking US personnel in Iraq, which are there to partner with the Baghdad government to ensure the enduring defeat of Daesh. The militias have now become more of a threat to the US and Iraqis than Daesh.
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Trump wants to know if the US has a partner in Iraq. The president is willing to pull US forces out of Iraq if this “partner” continues to disappoint. Republicans and Democrats are looking for a reason to end this experiment. And it won’t be without costs to Baghdad and Tehran.

Mustafa Al-Kahdimi has vowed to win back respect to Iraq’s troubled state, but daunting challenges lie ahead

​Since he took office in May, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has been invoking Iraq’s fractured national sovereignty as a major impediment to the country’s recovery and progress towards peace and prosperity.

Al-Kadhimi’s vision for sovereignty seems to mean something precise: without restoring the state’s authority it will be impossible to end the quagmire into which the country’s human and other resources are being constantly poured.

The issue of Iraq’s sovereignty, or rather lack of it, has been debated since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it has become starker and more urgent over recent years in view of the country’s internal and external challenges.

The combination of foreign interventions, cross-border terrorism, rising Iran-sponsored militias and transnational corruption offers sophisticated and well-reasoned arguments why Iraq has been in such disarray.

With the country facing multiple crises, Mustafa al-Kadhimi will  have a much harder time winning a mandate to rule.

​When Mustafa al-Kadhimi became Iraq’s prime minister on May 7, after five months of political deadlock in Baghdad, I argued his best chance of success was to fail fast. The only way to clean the Augean stables of Iraqi politics was with the strong broom of a popular mandate — and that could only be obtained from elections. Thoroughgoing political and economic reforms would require a majority — or at least a plurality with which to build an irresistible coalition — in parliament.

Last week, the prime minister called for early elections — on June 6, 2021, a year ahead of schedule. But Iraq’s circumstances have deteriorated so much in the three months since he took office, Kadhimi will have a much harder time convincing Iraqis to give him a mandate to rule.

All the crises he inherited have deepened. The coronavirus pandemic, already alarming when Kadhimi was sworn in, has since only grown more frightening, forcing him to announce fresh lockdowns. The Iraqi economy, having suffered extensive collateral damage from the Saudi-Russian oil war, has weakened. Powerful, Iran-backed Shiite militias have grown more brazen. Corruption, already ingrained in the body politic, seems to have metastasized across every aspect of the state.

​​A probe into the deaths will do little to reassure a restive nation, says demonstrator

Iraqi security forces stand guard outside the entrance of the Green Zone during a protest in the capital Baghdad in July ( AFP/Getty )The Iraqi authorities have admitted 560 people have been killed since October in anti-government rallies, as the country’s interior minister said police officers shot protesters using personal hunting rifles.

Iraq has been rocked by months of nationwide protests as thousands of Iraqi youth have taken to the streets to decry rampant corruption, poor services and unemployment. Security forces have used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds killing and maiming thousands.

On Thursday, Hisham Dawood, a political advisor to the country’s new prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, announced that hundreds had died in the clashes without going into detail.

He said the government will form a fact-finding committee to determine the circumstances of the deaths, adding that the authorities regard “all victims of the protests as martyrs”. Rights groups have, however, cast doubt on how effective such a body would be.

Robert Draper, a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to National Geographic, is the author of the new book "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq." Draper in 2008 published another book about Bush, "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush," which covered the first six years of his presidency. 

In a phone interview with Business Insider Columnist Anthony L. Fisher, Draper talked about why he felt the time was right to revisit the greatest foreign policy catastrophe of modern times, Donald Rumsfeld's micro-managing megalomania, and who in the administration will Colin Powell never forgive. 
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.