Charles Tripp of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies explains his views on Iraq's political future to David Tresilian The author of a standard history of Iraq and of a host of books on the politics of the modern Middle East, Charles Tripp is professor of politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and a well-known western commentator on Iraqi and Middle Eastern affairs. Before the 2003 US-led invasion, Tripp was a member of a group of leading British academics that warned the then UK prime minister, Tony Blair, of the possible consequences of an Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Seven years later, and as the country emerges from a protracted period of civil conflict and digests the results of last month's parliamentary elections, Tripp once again often finds himself solicited for his views on Iraq's future prospects. As he explained in a wide-ranging interview with the Weekly, while the improved security situation in Iraq and the overall reduction in violence in the country can only be welcomed, there are nevertheless reasons to remain concerned about Iraq's political future. These reasons, bound up with Iraq's recent and not-so-recent history, have to do with the threatened reemergence of ingrained trends in the country's political life that could encourage the development of client networks and control by patronage rather than disinterested public institutions and genuinely participatory democracy. As Tripp put it when talking to the Weekly, there is the uncomfortable possibility that last month's long- awaited parliamentary elections, far from marking a step on the path to genuine democracy in Iraq, could simply be part of the "validation process" of an oligarchy that has spent the past seven years consolidating its power. "I don't want to prejudge whatever emerges from the election process," Tripp said, "but when you look at the Iraqi parliament that came out of the 2005 elections it wasn't just that this was unrepresentative of a whole section of Iraq, it was also that this was a field that allowed powerful, ambitious and ruthless individuals the scope to play their games and an apparently validated space in which to do so." "This is the question about the public institutions that are now being created in Iraq. How much will they embody power, and how much will they simply be the instruments of a power that is located elsewhere, some of it in the American embassy and some of it with Nouri al-Maliki and other leading figures?" One of the concerns about the recent round of parliamentary elections, designed to produce a new Iraqi parliament and government that will oversee the planned withdrawal of the remaining US forces from the country later this year, "is that no one in Iraq will know anything about how power is to be shared out until everything is declared and announced, everything having been cooked up behind closed doors by the familiar 12 faces or whatever." "It's all very well to talk about building public institutions in Iraq, but if it's a question of the authority of those institutions, how much authority will they have if they are tied to individuals and to a whole patronage network? It's a question about the system of politics in which they are operating." In his book A History of Iraq, a history of the country from its formation following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War to the American occupation after the 2003 US-led invasion, Tripp identifies various "temptations" that have long operated in Iraq, both before and after the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. One of these temptations has been the ease with which Iraqi politicians have historically tended to use violence to achieve their ends, with the country's formal institutions often being at the mercy of military or other forms of violent intervention. However, a further temptation has been to work through the apparatus of what Tripp terms the "shadow state" -- the network of influence and patron-client relations that stands behind public state institutions -- in order to bypass inconvenient constitutional mechanisms or to ensure that power remains in the hands of a restricted ruling caste, despite the existence of apparently democratic decision-making mechanisms. In the aftermath of the 2010 elections, and at a time when much ink is being spilled on the need to reestablish meaningful public institutions in Iraq following the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the US-led invasion and seven years of political instability and civil conflict, "how much emphasis is being placed on the authority of the state and how much on the idea of the state as providing for and serving the citizens?" "There's an unease that the power of the institutions may not depend upon their public authority so much as upon the connections and networks behind them that run them," Tripp commented. "One of the concerns about the electoral procedure now is that the coalition that emerges will be determined in the sense of who is likely to get on with whom, giving enormous leverage to people who are already powerful as the patrons of Iraqi society and making the elections themselves a validation process but not a decisive process." "It will be interesting to see how the public institutions that are built and the ministries that are created are divided up. One thing that was very apparent after the previous elections was that if you had the ministry of the interior you could do what you liked with it. Ministries were given out to clients, like tax farming." "The test of the coalition that emerges from the March 2010 elections will be twofold. First, what is the relation between the different ministers, and has the prime minister, whether it turns out to be al-Malaki or [leader of the Iraqiya Party] Ayad Allawi, been put there because he is the one thought likely to give out the best rewards? And second, how will the government proceed? The whole point of having a ministry as a fiefdom is that you can install your friends." "One doesn't want to prejudge the situation, but there is the suspicion that people will be included within the coalition government not to run public services in a disinterested manner, though that may be the rhetoric, but to get their hands on this or that ministry in the interests of taking care of a following." DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC SERVICE: As Tripp explained, running the political system in this way, part of a tradition in Iraq's political life long before the Saddam dictatorship, tends to hollow out those public institutions that are built and devalues formal democratic mechanisms. Furthermore, if real power does not lie in the public institutions of the state, but operates in the shadows at one remove behind them, then this also corrodes the idea of the state's existing to serve its citizens. "For many Iraqis in different parts of Iraq, the idea of serving the public is a very important part of what the state should be doing," particularly with regard to building decent infrastructure and providing healthcare, education and public utilities like water, electricity and sewerage," Tripp said. "However, for others the notion of public service is much, much weaker, and if state institutions are run as fiefdoms then the notion of public service becomes elided with the notion of private interests and of serving various client bases, which will have an enormous impact in terms of what services are delivered." "The test here will be whether the new government that emerges from the elections is able to provide the water, the sewerage, the electricity, the jobs, and so on, and if there's a very weak idea of public service, and if ministries are being used to reward friends and reinforce networks, then clearly a very large part of the Iraqi population will be left out." Asked whether he was optimistic about a new Iraqi government's being able to pass this test, or whether it seemed likely that past patterns would continue, Tripp said that if judged by the "past track records of the people at the top, then you have to be quite pessimistic." "My own feeling is that none of the major players have a good track record in terms of public service. They all have a discernible track record in terms of carving out ministries as fiefdoms, creating systems of patronage, using public funds to support political purposes, and if all this continues then the election of the new Iraqi parliament does not introduce a new democratic and responsible system in Iraq. On the contrary, it provides the validation of an oligarchy." "If the members of that oligarchy cooperate with each other, then things are likely to function. If on the other hand they fall out, then you have the potential for something much worse," possibly along the lines of renewed violence as powerful figures recruit followings to their cause or solicit various kinds of military, para-military, or external intervention. While the 2003 US-led invasion was widely justified at the time at least in part by a desire to transform Iraqi politics, notably through the removal of the Saddam dictatorship, but also through the installation of a form of democratic politics that could serve as a signal of change in Iraq and in the wider region, in Tripp's view seven years later what may have happened instead is "the notion that you got rid of one Saddam and left us with 50." It may be, he added, that "the principles of politics in Iraq have not changed, even as the identity of the politicians has changed. The really interesting question is whether the framework of political possibility has changed, whether it is not now possible for a minister or prime minister to put his relatives or networks into a ministry. Once you see that happening, then you can say that things have changed, but I haven't seen much evidence of that yet, rather the opposite." "The test of the National Audit Office of Iraq, for example, will be whether it now starts prosecuting people accused of running off with state funds. I mean, where has all the money gone? People in Iraq are saying, 'why are we living in sewage water when we're told that there are millions?' raising the question of what will the prospect of 10 million barrels of oil a day mean for the population as a whole." "People have recounted anecdotally that the scale of the bribery in Iraq at the moment is so staggering partly because people think there's a lot of money around, and partly because people are operating on a very short-term notion that 'I'm here today, but I may be dismissed tomorrow, so I have got to make the office pay.'" Should this kind of thing continue, Tripp said, it will be very difficult to build support for the new institutions, or even to see them as important, given the operations of the "shadow state" of client networks behind the scenes. "How many people died fighting for it when the Egyptian parliament was swept away in 1952, or when the Iraqi parliament was swept away in 1958," he asked. "None, because the way the regimes had behaved had utterly discredited the country's institutions. If the new Iraqi democratic institutions do not deliver in a way that makes sense to people, then people will not turn out to vote in future elections and they will realise that these institutions are not where real power lies." DECENTRALISATION OR FEDERALISM? A feature of the Iraqi state from its earliest days has been the centralisation of power in the capital Baghdad and the existence of a minority Sunni ruling caste despite the fact that the majority of the population is Shia and a significant part of the state, the Kurdish north, is not Arab. Does Tripp see any significant decentralisation of power in Iraq as a result of the 2003 US-led invasion and its aftermath? "My sense," Tripp said, "is that none of the people coming to the fore in Iraq at the moment are federalists. Federalism is a euphemism for Kurdish autonomy. None of the other Iraqis are in favour. You may be seeing some power being delegated to the provincial level, but it's not so much the central state that is the problem anyway, but rather the nature of that central state. The 'shadow state' behind the public state is still alive and well in Iraq, though now it is more decentred." "Some people have argued that what the war did was to destroy the public state in Iraq, which it did, but it didn't destroy the shadow state. It changed it, but it didn't destroy it. In any case, Saddam's state was much less centralised than people imagine. He sat at the centre like a giant spider, but it was at the centre of a web that depended upon people's cooperation. He wanted to give the impression of a modern and totalitarian state, and some people swallowed that," but the system as a whole always worked on the basis of patron-client relations. While many of Saddam's followers were members of his Sunni clan base, others were bound to him simply by ties of mutual interest and were from Christian or Shia backgrounds. "In some ways, the image that the Americans put forward of a Sunni minority dominating a Shia majority was wrong in terms of how power actually worked in Saddamist Iraq. Certainly, there was a minority, but it was a minority of people trusted by Saddam. However, they weren't trusted because they came from his family, but rather because they had served him well and had demonstrated that for them the centre of the universe was Saddam." Regarding the Kurdish north of Iraq, the question is likely to be how Kurdistan, already enjoying a measure of autonomy from 1991/2 onwards, is likely to relate in future to the rest of Iraq. "Do the Kurds still see Iraq as part of their lives, and will the new generation of Kurdish leaders, replacing [current president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region Massoud] Barzani and [current Iraqi president Jalal] Talabani still see things in the same way in terms of their relationship to Baghdad?" "A further danger is that an Arab politician may try to rally Arab Iraqis around the notion of a Kurdish enemy. Until 2003, something like one million Kurds lived in Baghdad, but one of the things that people have mentioned anecdotally is the departure of these people since. There may be a growing feeling that the Kurds have acted on behalf of the Americans in breaking up Iraq, or that the Kurds are the enemy. There are many flashpoints, the status of the northern city of Kirkuk being one of them, and the whole situation could become much more volatile." FUTURE DIRECTIONS: Finally, Tripp said, there were four developments he would like to see in Iraq, considering them positive signals that the country was heading in the right direction. The first of these would be greater respect for the rule of law and the development of a legal system holding those in power to account. This would "not necessarily mean a spate of corruption trials, but it would mean that there were visible cases where if they try to close down trade unions the court says no, or if they try to shift people out of jobs the court says no, or anywhere where you see a robust court system enforcing people's rights, whether as citizens, or as employees, or whatever." The second would be more visible attention to public services and respect for the idea that "institutions in Iraq belong to all Iraqis and should serve the Iraqi people as a whole and not just the followers of this or that leader. There needs to be a structure such that as oil revenues increase they don't get funneled into arms procurement or security organisations but instead are used for the public services of Iraq." "This would be a good thing in itself, and it would also tell you something about the way those in power think about people as having rights to public services, healthcare, education, and so on. It would also make things more solid, since whatever people's feelings about abstract notions of democracy or rights might be, if they felt that if you went to court you would find protection, this would install a very different relationship between the individual and the state, making the individual into a citizen having rights." A third feature that would give cause for optimism about the future of Iraq would be the absence of violence and the "removal of the idea that people can get what they want simply by showing how ruthless they are, removing violence from the political equation." Lastly, there would need to be an end to the foreign occupation of Iraq, something which, Tripp said, related to the authority of democratic and other institutions set up under the conditions of occupation. "The last Iraqi parliament was seen as an institution that had hardly any authority at all, being seen as an American construct designed to fulfill an American plan and viewed in that way across the region." "This time round, in the wake of the 2010 elections, one of the tests will be what the new parliament produces. Even though it was set up when there were still some 90,000 American troops in the country, it should oversee the departure of those troops and the establishment of true sovereignty." "Quite a few of the Iraqis who will come to power are people who are deeply mindful of the role America has played in getting them into power, so the question is will they be able to establish themselves as something other than American puppets, especially if they are competing with others who are saying that they weren't the ones who were parachuted in on the back of an American invasion." "That argument is going to be a very difficult and touchy one, just as it was during the period of British influence in Iraq after 1932 and 1945, which itself had a deeply corrosive effect on the authority of state institutions and the legitimacy of the whole Iraqi political system. One of the tests for American administrations, maybe this one, maybe a future one, is to say that Iraq may do things the US doesn't like, maybe with Iran, maybe with Turkey, and to resist the temptation to intervene if the Iraqi government is seen to be acting independently." "It will be incredibly difficult for the Americans to resist the temptation to intervene, especially given the possibility of rhetorical inflation along the lines of their having saved the country from dictatorship and so on," Tripp said. "But if they do intervene, they will always be seen as the power behind the throne, and eventually the whole system will be corroded."
