Iraq: The Banker, the Mullah, the Militia and the Cook by Amir Taheri
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12574/iraq-banker-mullah-militia-cook
- The young technocrats around Muqtada al-Sadr get their ideas, especially on economics, more from Milton Friedman’s texts than Muhamad-Baqir al-Sadr’s “Our Economy”.
- The next step should be to also accept ideological and political diversity. I believe that in the past 15 years, Iraq has made significant progress in that direction.
- In a system of down-to-earth politics, Iraq would be liberated from utopian illusions that have caused it so much tragedy, and focus on bread-and-butter issues closer to the concerns of both our banker friend and his cook.
“How is Iraq?” we asked a friend just back from Baghdad the other day.
“Bad, very bad, my friend,” was the reply. “Even my cook has an opinion about how to form the new government.”
The Iraqi friend is a prominent banker who spent his youth in exile in the West and returned home only after the fall of Saddam Hussein. However, he seems to have retained the traditional mindset of many of us Middle Easterners, who see ourselves as victims of despotism and yet fear any system in which even the cook has an opinion.
To be fair to our friend, the current political scene in Baghdad isn’t exactly reassuring. The general election failed to produce an outright majority and the formation of a new government could take weeks if not months.
We are used to seeing governments formed and reshuffled in hours, if not minutes, with narrow elite of “usual suspects” playing musical chairs in and out of ministerial posts. In that system, any hitch in forming a government could be dealt with by having some ministers shot, as did Saddam Hussein in his heyday, or exiled into ambassadorial posts with a golden handshake.
It is not only our friend’s cook who has an opinion on shaping the next government. In a bigger slot are a number of figures whose political CV wouldn’t fill half a page.
There is Muqtada al-Sadr, a maverick Shiite cleric who has recast himself as a talented political maneuverer, trying to captain a team that brings together antediluvian Communists on the one hand and shadowy Shiite militiamen on the other. Then there are a dozen or so other political and military baritones with American, Iranian and other song-masters inspiring their lyrics. In the background are tribal chiefs and grand ayatollahs who could nudge the field-players this way or that with a shaking of their beards.
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