NEIL PARTRICK
1. IRAQ
Summary of 'Iraq: A Functioning or a Failing State?'
A research paper written by Neil Partrick in September 2022.
Introduction
This research paper examines the structure and exercise of power in Iraq. It considers the competing interests both within and external to the state, and how these contribute, or not, to state functionality. The paper provides some historical context, but its primary aim is to address the current situation and the prospects for stability going forward. Political instability continues to threaten to spill-over into violent street confrontation, reflecting a stalemated factional struggle for power. In the process the legitimacy, coherence and functionality of the Iraqi state is being further undermined.
The research is based mainly on extensive interviews conducted with key Iraqi political and social figures.
Key Points
Muhasasa (the quota-based apportionment of resources and jobs) is ingrained in the Iraqi state and in its wealth disbursal. Muhasasa will not die easily given intra-sect pressures and the influence of regional actors and their political and financial patronage. Muhasasa runs deeper than the three main ethno-sectarian groupings. The ‘majority’ government proposed by Moqtada Al-Sadr wouldn’t change it. Quotas would still be required to ensure that those factions politically ‘representing’ the three main sectarian groupings are able to adequately service their distinct interests, especially as they would be more vulnerable to rivals within their own sectarian camp but outside of government.
Sub-state and para-state loyalties to local or regional actors/ideologies weaken the Iraqi nation-state. Important ministries like interior, oil, and defence are less an expression of state power and functionality, than a platform for any major militia and/or political movement (Shia, Sunni Arab, and Kurdish) to use for power, patronage and protection of their sub-state networks.
Foreign states (US, Turkey and Iran included) and foreign non-state movements continue to contravene Iraqi sovereignty. This fuels political resentment and even legitimacy for sub-state actors whose armed and organisational capacity is asserted in defence of their ethno-sectarian group or, rhetorically, of Iraq itself.
The state is weak even if government measures look strong. A state, and a state leadership, without legitimacy can wield power, perhaps brutally as under Saddam Hussein, but the state itself will not be strong. Following decades of war and international sanctions, by the time of its wholesale foreign occupation in 2003 the Iraqi state was barely functioning.
Security is a factional and inter-factional business, compounding state weakness. Security whether over borders or oil fields and pipelines is militia business, and money trumps sect. Just as muhasasa is deeply sectarian and para-sectarian at the same time – all are ‘in the tent’ – then these smuggling networks cannot be fully cleaned up. Security, and the state’s inability to ensure it, is key to corruption, and in turn compounds the state’s failure to properly control its oil, borders, and much else.
There is greater loyalty to sub-state identity than to the Iraqi nation or the Iraqi state. Consequently, Iraqi national identity is compromised. National belonging is something felt but weakened by the effective political institutionalisation of sectarian belonging: Shia, Sunni (Arab) and Kurdish. Tribes are both a Shia and a Sunni social and political backstop, and a platform for militia power. National identity has weakened as Iraq has grown older. This is a perhaps surprising contrast with the efforts and partial success, albeit state-led, of younger countries in the Gulf.
Federalism is a crude way to try to hold disparate sectarian interests together. Federalism needs a strong centre. In Iraq in the 2000s the ‘Shia-stan’ version of federalism, and the Kurds’ ongoing ethno-sectarian ambitions in Kirkuk and the struggle to control its oil, further weaken the centre and threaten state break-up.
Sovereignty is managed by factional compromise, not held by the head of the government or the people. Sect will remain a key instrument of political power in Iraq; one that will continue to inherently weaken the state as an instrument of national power and as an expression of national sovereignty. The state will continue to struggle to function because sovereignty is diffuse or fundamentally compromised by non-state, semi-state and para-state actors.
Conclusion
Iraq remains a struggling state, and this research paper shows that there is little that can coalesce to make it a more coherent, functioning entity. The formation of a new government (delayed since the October 2021 elections) would make muhasasa operate more smoothly, not that it isn’t functioning in the absence of a formal government. Ministerial post-holders – whether caretakers or not – utilise their position to serve their interests and that of their faction and its popular base. The assumed inclusion of all significant political factions, from across the main ethno-sectarian groups, in a new government, presumably without the Sadrists, would enable business as usual. For this to be remotely stable though the Sadrists would need to be accommodated by means other than the parliamentary road to patronage that they departed from. Perhaps budgets in the hands of non-elected Sadrist officials in ministries or via the Baghdad and Basra governorates would do it. If the Sadrists are not accommodated in a new ‘national government’, then Sadr, who wanted to end the politics of the militia, will increasingly publicly assert his own militia’s strength on the street. Another ‘Battle of the Knights’, like the last Maliki-Sadr face-off, will beckon.
Sadr’s attempted Tripartite Alliance government with a Sunni Arab alignment and the leading Kurdish faction, reflected a perceptible weakening of Iranian influence in Iraq, even though Nouri Al-Maliki allegedly privately accused Iran of having supported Sadr’s past ambitions. The Sadrists believe Iran (and its ‘High Commissioner’, the IRGC Qods Force chief Esmail Qani) has encouraged Maliki to propose an anti-Sadrist PM. This rhetorical spinning aside, the reassertion of the ‘national’ government option by Maliki and his Shia allies reflects the fact that this Shia political plurality were never going to surrender power easily, and that they knew they could count on discreet Iranian backing, even if Tehran is not the player in Iraq it was under Qassim Suleimani. In this context a continued Kadhemi premiership could be the preference of the Iraqi Shia political plurality, the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, and Iran. Kadhemi, after all, has no political base, enjoys good relations with the ‘enemy’ (the US), and is unable to seriously restructure the Hashed Al-Sha’abi. The leading Hashed militias may not be Iranian tools, but they are not an Iraqi nationalist enemy of Iran either. Then there is the dreaded option of another election. In which case we will have entered Groundhog Day in Iraq.
As long as the rhetoric of militia reconstruction does little to alter the Hashed’s shadow role as the armed wing of leading Shia political forces, whether Maliki’s Da’wa, Hadi Al-Amri’s Badr, Qais Khazali’s Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, and others of an even more overt wilaya hue, then Iran will be content and Iraqi sovereignty will remain an oxymoron. The US will seek to persuade whomever the nominal Iraqi ‘Commander-in-Chief’ is, that loosening the Iranian lines of political and militia influence is an important part of a wider regional realignment in which pre-eminent Sunni Arab-led states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt (together with Jordan), are hoping to include Iraq. Iraq will probably be a member of any Arab club that is going, as long as Israel isn’t visibly present. Iraq’s foreign minister will sit in any fora that may encourage Baghdad’s ‘normalisation’ with Iraq’s former Arab brethren. That foreign minister is and will be a cypher for the wider internal and regional Iraqi status quo in which Baghdad isn’t master of its own house.
In the north, Baghdad will contest with Irbil for Kirkuk and the control of oil (court decisions do not affect practise, it seems). However, the Baghdad Government will let other Iraqis fight Turkey as the latter constrains ‘foreign’ Kurds in Iraq and makes a nonsense of either Iraqi or would-be (Iraqi) Kurdish sovereignty. As Turkey bombs parts of the Iraqi north, so too does Iran assault Iraqi territory indirectly, or in recent months even directly. Unusually, Iran admitted in March 2022 to bombing what it said was a ‘Zionist’ (Israeli) target in the KRG capital Irbil. However, this was equally likely to have been an Iranian-attempted but unsuccessful coercion of the KDP over its (since failed) participation in a three-way Sadrist-led majority government, and resentment at the presence of Iranian Kurdish militia. The US’ reconfigured military role inside Iraq remains contested and controversial, even though many Iraqi factions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd) do not wish the US’ infringement of Iraqi sovereignty to end just yet.
Outside of the machinations of formal executive power, sub-state identities, and to extent para-state identities, look set to run counter to state coherence and strength. A state that does not function properly always enables default space for identities and social formations for popular support and even some political weight. This remains the case among Sunni Arabs even as ‘tribe’ is neither the state-incorporated construct nor the intermediate force it once was in Iraq. Among the Shia, tribe is likewise a platform for social and political support and, for Hashed Al-Sha’abi militia especially, influence.
Iraq’s regional and international ‘allies’ continue to make a nonsense of Iraqi statehood, often assisted by Iraqi clients pursuing sub-state interests concomitant with those of their external sponsors. A truly national government, whose component parts are not calculating their political decisions based on sub and/or para-state interests, remains illusive in Iraq, if it ever existed. Iraqi state functionality does exist, but in sovereign security or economic terms it is often by accident rather than design.
Sovereign authority isn’t lent to the Iraqi state by Iraqi citizens equally capable of withdrawing this consent. Sovereignty in Iraq is a painfully negotiated compromise between powerful armed political groups asserting state writ when that fits with their own sectional interests, and equally withdrawing approval for state action if that does not accord with factional considerations. The literal security of the state and thus of the citizenry is determined or directly undermined by competing state, sub-state, para-state and even anti-state actors. Iraqi state sovereignty is an awkward by-product of armed groups, not the supposed outcome of popular sovereign will.
September 2022
A brief article by me on Iraqi state functionality ('New government or not, the Iraqi state is still struggling to function') was published on the AGSIW (Arabian Gulf States Institute in Washington) website on November 4 2022.
2. SYRIA
The Syria chapter will be guided by these thoughts:
The wider book of which the Syria study will form a part – ‘State Functionality in the Middle East & North Africa’ (MENA) - will partly work from the Weberian premise that a recognisable state has to be able to deploy a clear majority of effective violence. However the utility of holding ‘the gun’ also means that state rulers can patronise and even determine a kind of sub-ruling class of officials (bureaucrats and mil-sec officers), businesspeople, and, inverting Marx, the doyens of a cultural ‘infrastructure’ that help shape a nation-state’s imagined identity.
In the conduct of this Syria-specific analysis it will also be recognised that the state’s writ is currently still disputed in some territorial pockets that have a strong dependence on foreign governments. However foreign governments cannot, by definition, constitute the Syrian state or any fraction of it.
The ‘Syrian Arab Republic’ (SAR) both exists and is functioning, however much the effectiveness of that functionality might be debated when it comes to both the ‘government-controlled’ areas and those bits of territory held by Turkish or US-backed forces. The struggle of Syria as a state to function is of course partly complicated by the actions of these and other external actors and their affect on ‘government controlled’ Syria too, whether in the form of economic sanctions or periodic acts of unsolicited military intervention/attack. (Even solicited foreign military intervention in a sovereign state is problematic in terms of whose or what sovereignty is being upheld).
My analysis of Syria will thus take a necessarily different form than that deployed in my draft analysis of Iraq (see above). That analysis was inevitably focused on the weakness of the Iraqi state and the power of violent authority residing in the hands of competing militia whose shadow, mini-state, authority has a formal state/governmental expression but one that is largely about these militias’ struggle for access to state assets (financial and/or weapons) to suit sub-state and often sectarian and intra-sectarian interests.
In the Syrian case I will start from a different premise: that the state both exists - albeit not over the entirety of the sovereign state of Syria recognised by the UN, Arab League etc. – and that it is functioning. The uninterrupted payment by Damascus of state salaries to Kurdish officials in the so-called ‘AANES’ (Kurdish-led parts of north-east Syria) is obviously an example of the state’s writ running beyond ‘Government-controlled territory’. Reports of baccalaureate students from Idlib being allowed to cross into Syrian Government-controlled territory to take their exams in order to ensure that their hoped for qualification is recognised by the Syrian state, also suggests that this de jure and de facto Syrian state has authority beyond its nominal limitations. These students’ motivations may be partly a pragmatic assumption that the SAR is returning to their territory too – but then how do we judge much acceptance in the west of the state that provides them with a passport and perhaps some welfare and infrastructure services?
This analysis needs to consider how much Syria’s state functionality is affected by perceptible foreign occupation and foreign economic coercion. However, it also needs examining - in Syria as in any country whose leadership claims authority, not just the brute ability to rule – whether the state has acceptance and a degree of legitimacy in its operation of state authority. The Weberian cliché is, after all, about that violent monopoly of power being perceptibly ‘legitimate’. The latter, as Weber observed, can patently rest on different forms of ‘accepted’ authority.
Western state theorists tend to assume some form of periodic popular act of baya’ (oath of allegiance) that follows a preferably healthy questioning in the context of some form of political competition. This isn’t what Weber assumed was necessarily the case for the operation of all forms of legitimate and/or practical power. Western electoral circuses don’t necessarily provide unalloyed legitimacy either. Consider the growing tendency for some western nationals to deploy ‘not in my name’ political casuistry to seek to delegitimise their democratic leaders. Or, in the US at least, the outright denial by some of the 2020 election realities and even an endorsement of an insurrectionary alternative. Over half a century ago in western Europe this notion of political legitimacy was largely confined to a vocal, but highly unrepresentative, elite student fringe.
My analysis of Syria will work from the perception that elections throughout MENA are almost all irrelevant to the political power of elites, with only the partial exception of Turkey, Israel, and, at a stretch, Iraq. Political legitimacy isn’t found via the exercise of Middle Eastern elections, but it does seemingly exist for the Syrian state and for its leaders. My analysis will seek to examine on what this legitimacy rests. My research may suggest that legitimacy in Syria is partly based on fear of the alternative and partly reflective of habit. It is not my job though to question the validity of these sentiments.
So my analysis of Syrian state functionality will ask – mainly via an extensive series of interviews with widely-drawn figures in politics, business, media and academia – what does power in Syria mean, how does it operate, who holds it, how accepted is this holding of power and why, and whether its deployment is effective, and, if not, why not?
Inevitably there will be many other questions too. However the purpose of this merely initial and explanatory note is to show that I am open to all considerations in the analysis of the operation of power in Syria and of what that means. The reality of a state needs to consider the operation of its rulers and/or the ruling class. How firm a vanguard in the operation of power does such a ‘class’ form, my analysis will need to ask. Or are such a grouping’s components simply the upper echelon of the ruling party? Or, more complicatedly, do they constitute a wider political, military, security and business grouping whose members only sometimes overlap and who may have little interaction.
If, ultimately, the state in Syria has become inseparable from the power of a much smaller elite at the top, is this, I will consider, conducive to a functional state, or is this inherently putting the state at risk through the potential brittleness of state rule? Assuming that the Syrian state will be shown to be more than the power operation of a tiny grouping at the top, then my analysis will go on to explore how and why there is a wider ‘buy-in’ among Syrians. Furthermore, it will ask how much this sense of belonging to the state is as much a part of Syrian state power, as are the decisions of those who pull the military, intelligence or economic levers.
UPDATE:
In November 2023 I gave a paper on 'Syria: Failed State or Reborn Regional Actor?' to an online meeting of the Middle East Studies Centre (MESC) at the University of Hull. The paper reflected my initial research for the Syria chapter.