Even before the Covid-19 tsunami washed over the world, Iraq was at best, a fragile democracy barely hanging on in the wake of almost daily street protests, a revolving door government, and the constant threat posed by the potential return of ISIS, among other serious concerns. It certainly did not need any help from a natural disaster to take it off of life support and transport it to the morgue. The coronavirus pandemic may have just become the hearse to transport the current Iraqi regime to the land of the dead.
The Iraqi government has a lot of serious problems right now aside from the Covid-19 pandemic. PM Adel Abdul Mahdi resigned in November following weeks of violent street protests calling for his ouster. As a result, there is also no confirmed cabinet since the leaderless administration has not been able to reach a quorum to vote on confirmation of cabinet nominees. Iraq does have a president, Barham Salih, a Kurd, but this is merely a ceremonial office with little real authority. The current Iraqi Intelligence Chief, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, has just been appointed as Prime Minister. He must now put together an acceptable cabinet for confirmation, or he will also be forced to vacate the position and leave the government leaderless once more. ISIS (or Daesh) has also recently shown signs that it may try to recapture some of its lost territory in Iraq following its defeat at the hands of the Iraqi Army (supported by American forces) in 2017. As if all that were not enough, the recent dramatic worldwide decline in the price of oil has fallen particularly hard on Iraq, a nation that derives more than 90% of its revenue from the sale of its oil reserves. And now, as if to mock the already crippled Iraqi regime, the worst viral pandemic in almost one hundred years has arrived in Iraq.
It can be argued that the collapse of Iraq had been preordained ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Indeed, it is difficult not to acknowledge that many unintentional, but nevertheless, serious mistakes were made by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) led by Director Paul Bremer during the early occupation of Iraq that had profound, long-term consequences for U.S. and allied forces, as well for as the Iraqi people. Perhaps no decision made by the CPA had a more direct effect and lasting consequence on both the allied occupation and the Iraqi people than the decision made by Bremer in May of 2003 to disband both the Iraqi Baath Party and the Iraqi Army, and to extricate (fire) all Baath Party members from all government positions. This action was known as “de-Baathification.”
I was serving in Iraq with the U.S. Army at Balad Air Base just north of Baghdad during this period, and I can state categorically that the decision by the CPA to disband the Iraqi Army and remove all Baath Party members from government positions was a catastrophic error that directly caused the development of the Iraq insurgency and the development of the Iraqi branch of ISIS. This resulted in many years of needless violence and the loss of life for many American and allied service members, as well an untold numbers of deaths and displacement of Iraqi citizens. The demonstrably negative effects of this ill-advised order by the CPA were immediate and profound. A U.S. intelligence journal report from February 2010 accurately summarizes this misadventure:
Early in the occupation of Iraq two key decisions were made that gravely jeopardized US chances for success in Iraq: (1) the decision to bar from government work Iraqis who ranked in the top four levels of Sadam’s Baath Party or who held positions in the top three levels of each ministry; (2) the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and replace it with a new army built from scratch. These two fateful decisions were made against the advice of military and CIA professionals and without consulting important members of the President’s staff and cabinet.
The Iraqi government, including the military, has never recovered from this decision. Sectarian in-fighting and political jockeying between Shia, Sunni and Kurds has taken up the past seventeen years since the 2003 invasion. The result has been an unstable and perpetually weak national government. With the country essentially cut up into three distinct demographic zones (Sunni-Central, Shia-Southern, Kurds-Northern) and one semi-autonomous region (the Kurdish north), trying to administer anything from a central government based in Baghdad is a serious challenge even to a stable regime, which Iraq has never had since 2003. Trying to administer a coordinated national response to the Covid-19 pandemic is proving to be all but impossible.
The dismal conditions within most hospitals and the disintegrating infrastructure of Iraq’s public healthcare system has brought almost insurmountable challenges to healthcare providers trying their best to care for the growing number of sick and dying Iraqis. One exhausted Iraqi doctor stated that healthcare providers “are facing an emergency on par with the crises under Saddam Hussein in the 1990s and at the height of the civil war from 2006–8.” By the former crisis under Saddam, he means that doctors were forced to halve doses of essential medicines or forgo administering drugs altogether. Hospitals fell into disrepair, health centers lacked stethoscopes and sterilizers, and medical equipment sat idle without replacement parts. An additional new problem they now face is the almost total lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare providers such as masks, gloves, and respirators. Ventilators are in extremely short supply as well. Without these vital medical necessities, it is virtually impossible to even begin to treat the increasing number of newly infected patients. Although the official number of infections as of 5 May within Iraq is only 2,346 with 98 deaths, that number is widely believed to be much lower than the actual figures and is on an upward trajectory.
And there is now renewed friction between the Shia militias in Iraq that were until recently loyal to their Iranian backers and their Iranian counterparts. Strong ties between Iraqi and Iranian Shia were one of the few national sources of strength and stability. Now even that relationship is in danger of unraveling. The killing of Iranian General and Quds leader Qassem Suleimani by a U.S. drone in Baghdad in January only exacerbated the already volatile situation. The widening fissure between rival Iraqi militias is now a real problem and a question mark going forward. Unfortunately, the Iraqi Army is still too weak to play referee in any protracted inter-sectarian sectarian struggle. That leaves Baghdad with no real resources to solve any of their pressing issues.
With all of these major, and seemingly insurmountable problems, can the current Iraqi regime hang on? As stated earlier, Iraq has been heavily impacted by the massive drop in world oil prices. Most of the country is tied in one way or another to the oil industry, tied either directly by working for the state oil conglomerate, or through a few private contracts with companies that depend on oil revenues for their survival. Iraq does not have much of a private sector. When state oil revenues tank, the entire economy tanks with it. The state’s seven million public employees and pensioners are rightfully worried. “Without salaries, that’s the end of Iraq,” says Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former national-security chief. Without oil revenue, the Iraqi national government will not be able to pay its public employees or retirees. It will not be able to pay its massive international debt obligations. It will also not be able to fund its rapidly disintegrating public healthcare system that is barely functioning under the weight of the expanding Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic will only get worse in Iraq, as it will in many other countries that were slow to respond to the outbreak. The loss of what little funding they previously received from Baghdad will tax an already broken healthcare system that is dependent on a dysfunctional national government that is itself near collapse. It is very possible, some might even say probable, that the Covid-19 pandemic wil bring the final death knell of the current Iraqi regime. It may already have begun.
