Lately in Iraq it is increasingly clear that many Iraqis want to rid their multi-confessional society of its secular past from the era of Saddam Hussein and to turn the state into a Shi’a theocracy. This is evidenced by several facts and decisions taken by the government.

USA’s negative influence

Over the years, the idea of rebuilding Iraq as a democratic state has become so questionable that much of the time it is simply ironic, as the country continues to slide into the rule of a Shi’a oligarchy, kleptocracy and now theocracy. The main idiotic mistake of the US occupation authorities after 2003 was the hasty drafting of a new constitution (although no one asked them to do so), which was strongly influenced by Shi’a groups and Kurdish nationalist parties promoting their own narrow programmes. When the new constitution was approved in a referendum largely boycotted by Sunni Arab Iraqis, they argued that it was a test of whether secularism and democracy could be reconciled with political Islam and whether Iraq’s new rulers would be able to navigate between conflicting values and cultures. It soon became clear that such statements were exaggerated and ridiculous and they were quickly refuted by numerous shortcomings and problems in the application of the new – or rather the US – constitution, which was forcibly imposed on the Iraqi people by their American occupiers.

Almost 20 years later, it turns out that the constitution, which was supposed to be a new ‘social contract’ between Iraqis and the state, has many structural and political flaws and does not at all take into account the Iraqi reality. Today, the country that has been bankrupted by the USA has to cope with instability in its fragile political system, as well as sectarian and ethnic divisions, which have turned Iraq into a home for Shi’as, Sunnis, Kurds and other minorities – it is their home, but in no way is it a state. Instead of stimulating the ‘consensual democracy’ professed by the US drafters of the constitution, the institutions of post-invasion Iraq created a sectarian and ethnically-oriented quota system, which led to the dominance of the country’s main Shi’a political groups in the government, parliament, judiciary........

© New Eastern Outlook