For two decades, I have never been optimistic about the political order built in Iraq after 2003. My scepticism was not emotional but structural: the state was engineered in a way that carried its own failure within it. Even Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Iraq, eventually admitted that Washington had “created a failed state in Iraq.” That belated confession merely echoes what Iraqis have lived through for twenty years—a political system rooted in sectarian apportionment, a rentier economy distributed through party networks, and armed groups outside the state that guarantee the survival of those networks regardless of who sits in government.

Yet this long arc of pessimism is now confronted by a hesitant temptation: the urge to pin hope on a sweeping anti‑corruption campaign inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. In the early hours of Sunday, 28th June, counterterrorism units raided the homes of politicians, lawmakers, and senior officials, arresting dozens. The government framed the operation as a “state action” involving the judiciary, security agencies, and the executive branch, stressing that no sect or party was being targeted. Sunni and Shia figures were included, as if to signal that—for once—the state was acting as a state rather than as an extension of entrenched patronage networks.

But a deeper reading suggests something more familiar: not a structural shift, but a re‑sorting within an existing network. The political system that produced Iraq’s corruption is not merely permissive; it is designed to make corruption a formal function of governance.

In such a system, officials are not arrested because the state suddenly decided to defend public funds. They are arrested because the network of interests is recalibrating under internal and external pressure—sacrificing some of its members to preserve the architecture........

© Middle East Monitor