When Mustafa Al-Kadhimi assumed office as Iraq’s prime minister in May this year, he made a string of reform promises, many of which made headlines and went from weeding out corruption to improving public services and restoring the nation’s battered sovereignty.

Al-Kadhimi came to power after the largest wave of popular protests in Iraq’s recent history, tapping into widespread anger at poor public services, political instability, government dysfunction, corruption and increasing Iranian interference.

With an ambitious reform plan promised by Al-Kadhimi when he took office, many inside and outside Iraq had hoped the beleaguered nation was finally set to enter a new era of change after nearly two decades of turmoil.

While Al-Kadhimi received public backing from Iraqis for his programme to drain the swamp of corruption in the country, the international community saw his appointment as an opportunity to begin to put Iraq back on its feet and curtail Iran’s influence in the country.

Seven months on, however, Al-Kadhimi has failed to show the efficacy needed in order to implement the reform agenda required to end Iraq’s uninterrupted and painful crisis and meet the people’s demands.

Among Al-Kadhimi’s biggest broken promises has been downsizing the country’s entrenched political groups, reining in the Iran-backed militias in the country, and restructuring Iraq’s security forces, all of which are needed to restore Iraqi state sovereignty.

Whether this failure to realise his ambitions has been owing to a lack of means or a lack of resilience, Al-Kadhimi has not lived up to his pledges to improve public services and combat corruption, in particular that which implicates big names among the country’s ruling oligarchs.

Perhaps his most notable failure has been stopping the deterioration of Iraq’s fiscal situation, which has forced his government to delay paying salaries and to request loans from the international market and support from the international community.

Al-Kadhimi has not been able to fulfill one of his signature promises, which was to bring those responsible for the deaths of nearly 600 protesters to justice and to address cases of disappearance and death threats to activists.

One of Al-Kadhimi’s main tasks was to hold early elections, but doubts are growing that a new election law passed by the Iraqi parliament will be able to ensure fair and credible balloting, a key demand of the protesters.

From breaking his reform promises to a failure to show his leadership in challenging the oligarchs’ monopoly on power, Al-Kadhimi has showed himself to be an amateur who has no solutions to Iraq’s crisis.

Yet, a closer look at Iraq’s continuous drift towards chaos shows the great expectations pinned on Al-Kadhimi may have been part of the problem. Iraq’s problems are much bigger than an interim prime minister could have been expected to tackle, especially one who had been tasked by the country’s entrenched ruling oligarchy to weather the storm of a popular uprising.

The fact remains that the essence of Iraq’s problems is deeply rooted in the transition process initiated following the US-led invasion of the country in 2003 that failed to ensure good governance through the rebuilding of an effective and viable Iraqi state.

It was clear right from the start that the root of Iraq’s troubles lay in the nature of the fraught consensus model that the US Occupation Authority started building in Iraq after the invasion under the pretext of encouraging compromises by the country’s different communal groups.

An ethno-sectarian quota system was first introduced by the US Occupation Authority when it appointed pro-invasion Iraqi exiles having identity backgrounds to the provisional government after the invasion known as the Iraqi Governing Council.

The communally divided quotas continued throughout the country’s interim and transitional governments and became a political tradition that has continued to shape the power-sharing between the ethno-sectarian-based political parties in the country up until the present.

The fragmentation of the political landscape that followed shows that the governance regime set up at the time and dominated by an identity-centred political class has continued to determine Iraq’s destiny.

Each of the four parliaments elected since the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 have been formed according to a formula in which competition and conflicts over power and wealth-sharing have prevailed instead of balancing inter-ethnic interests.

Soon, the much-trumpeted post-Saddam “nascent democracy” in Iraq started to wear thin, and the country’s parliament became dominated by a new political class put in charge by the US Occupation Authority and its cronies.

Each of the parliamentary elections were held under laws tailor-made to help the new oligarchs increase their dominance in the parliament and control both the legislative and the executive branches of government in the country. 

Voting in each of the post-2003 elections also largely reflected identity-based preferences, helping to undermine the Iraqi nationalism which is supposed to act as a glue holding the state together in the eyes of its citizens.

Instead, the exclusive sect-based politics that took hold in Iraq fomented an identity crisis that triggered on-again off-again and sometimes bloody sectarian conflicts that have left the country teetering close to the edge.     

Further shattering any semblance of democratic legitimacy, the system fostered the rise of a political class that has left its mark on the country. The leaders of the ethno-sectarian groups managed to transform the consensus system into rule by oligarchs and their cronies.

In addition to failing to build a transitional leadership, stalling on reforms and forming successive incompetent governments, the country’s new ruling elite created a kleptocracy that has been in control of power and wealth in Iraq. 

While failing to rebuild a new and democratic Iraq, the ruling cliques also engaged in widespread political corruption and the manipulation of authority, subverting democracy and undermining people’s trust in government.

After a chaotic 2020, next year will be another year of uncertainty and unpredictability in Iraq, given the interactions between continued political instability, a painful economic crisis, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and fractious regional geopolitics.

In the coming year, Iraq is expected to hold further elections to choose a new parliament with the usual uncertainty. Many doubt that the next elections will be any different to those that have come before in patching up the disorder. 

There are increasing fears that free-and-fair elections will not be held under current circumstances. Iraq’s ruling political factions have manoeuvred to rewrite the country’s new voting law in a way that allows them to maintain control of the parliament and the government, for example.

The Iraqi Shia factions that still have their hands on the government and the Iraqi pro-Iran militias are expected to try hard to roll back other Shia groups and to make a new foray into the new parliament through intimidation.

While Iraq’s Sunni groups remain incapacitated, and the country’s Kurdish parties remain ethnically and politically self-centred and not particularly interested in restoring a strong national state, the country’s Shia political class will likely continue to exploit the opportunity of the elections to retain their control of the country.

For all these and other reasons, next year will be crucial for Iraq. A mix of communal decisions and policy dynamics could decide whether the country will be able to withstand the storms or whether it will face a prolonged deadlock.

It could even be a make-or-break year for the country if no attempt is made to replace nearly two decades of growing conflict with order, though this cannot succeed without first resolving the leadership conflict.

As a result of the continued political deadlock in the country, a financial and economic meltdown, militias causing increased havoc, and corrupt and ineffective leaders diametrically opposed to one another, Iraq will remain susceptible in 2021 to the upheaval it is experiencing today.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 24 December, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly