Commentary
The land of our lies voted peacefully – on the surface
It almost looks like Iraq has become a sort of island of stability in the heart of a bleeding Middle East. Obviously, this is not the case.
Iraq is the land of lies – our lies. That is why we tend to forget what actually happened there. Even the commemoration of the massacre of Italian soldiers in Nassiriya a few days ago took place without any context mentioned, as if it had been the result of a hurricane or an earthquake.
The first lie was that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The second was that the Iraqi regime was linked to Al Qaeda. In 2003, we swallowed all of it, all the lies from Bush Jr., Dick Cheney and Tony Blair. We took part in a senseless war of aggression that reduced the country to rubble.
Today, looking at the results of the elections in Iraq, it is almost unbelievable that they took place more or less peacefully. It almost looks like Iraq has become a sort of island of stability in the heart of a bleeding Middle East. Obviously, this is not the case. It’s as if we have forgotten the immense suffering of the Iraqi people, who, between occupation and terrorism, have seen at least 500,000 deaths and millions of refugees in over a decade. I remember those elections held under American occupation when I was going from one polling station to another with Giuliana Sgrena and Stefano Chiarini, while mortar rounds and suicide bombers were blowing up all around us.
Back then, life in Baghdad only happened a few hours per day. People went out at dawn, and by four in the afternoon, the streets were empty. It was like that for years. A city that once lived out its sweltering nights along the Tigris was locked down, shaking in fear, its ears perking up at any suspicious noise that wasn't the hum of generators. The electricity had never come back on after the first bombing in March 2003. Even the American cruise missiles of January 17, 1991 seemed an almost nostalgic memory – it was here that the world, for the first time, had watched a war unfold live on television.
The election results only give us a partial picture of contemporary Iraq. The Shiite Coalition for Reconstruction and Development, led by outgoing Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, came out on top in the legislative elections on November 11. After the Supreme Court validates the vote, the representatives will have 30 days to choose the Speaker of the Council of Representatives (a post reserved for the Sunni community) and the country’s president (a Kurd). The latter must then appoint a Shiite prime minister, who will have one month to form a government.
Iraqi observers are noting a widespread mistrust among citizens, who are prisoners of a system dominated by sectarian interests, which they hold responsible for the country's failure. Many, though fewer than expected, boycotted the vote at the behest of Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. An heir to a prestigious family of ayatollahs, Sadr led the revolts against the Americans. In a recent photo, the man I interviewed when he was still young in Najaf looks like he has prematurely aged, with a white beard. Back then, I encountered him dressed in a white shroud, “ready to suffer martyrdom” like other members of his family whom Saddam had murdered. He later spent a long time in Qom, the “Vatican of Iranian Shiism,” where he was persuaded to take part in government. He is one of the ayatollahs who stand for both struggle and governance, although in truth they are less and less convincing as they wave the simulacrum of Shiite revolution.
On the other hand, Al-Sudani, also a Shiite, has an acknowledged ability to balance the influence of the United States, which still maintains troops in the country, and Iran, which exerts strong influence over the Shiite political blocs. After the fall of Assad in Syria and the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraq is of strategic importance for Tehran. As in Syria, the Iranians invested men and money in Iraq to stop Al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate, which in the summer of 2014 was just an hour’s drive away from the capital. I saw the black flag of ISIS – which has by no means disappeared – flying just a few dozen kilometers from the Kurdish city of Erbil, in besieged Kobanî, and on the outskirts of Damascus. One of the architects of the Shiite resistance was Ayatollah Sistani (later visited by Pope Francis in Najaf) and General Qasem Soleimani, who was subsequently blown up by an American missile attack on the tarmac at the Baghdad airport.
These relatively recent events, and Tuesday's “sectarian” elections, all stem from a complex history that can be summed up by one word: “colonialism.” As if capturing the pieces of Iraq on a game board in the post-Ottoman chaos, the British relied on the Sunni minority to the detriment of the Shiites and Kurds, installing the Hashemite King Faisal in 1921. In the 1960s and 70s, as the rift between the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties played out, the Sunni regime in Baghdad masked its sectarianism behind the veneer of pan-Arab nationalism and secularism – banners it also flew during the eight-year war against Iran. The imposing mausoleum of Michel Aflaq, the Syrian Greek-Orthodox founder of the Ba'ath party who fled here into exile, can still be seen in Baghdad. It was only with the fall of Saddam in 2003 that the Shiites had their revenge.
The Americans, by dissolving the Ba'ath party and the Iraqi army, marginalized the Sunnis, making pretty much the same mistakes as their British predecessors, and ended up inflaming the resistance from the most radical Islam of Al Qaeda and ISIS. And now, of course, they’re receiving the Syrian jihadist Al Sharaa at the White House. This is why Iraq, “the land between the two rivers,” is the testing ground for our lies and our miserable contrivances, played out on the backs of entire populations, from Palestine to Syria, from Lebanon to Iraq.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/cosi-ha-votato-liraq-la-terra-delle-nostre-menzogne on 2025-11-15