 Good afternoon everybody, my name is Barry Kulfer and I'm the director of research here at the IIEA in Dublin. We're delighted to be joined today by Dr Renad Mansour, senior research fellow and project director of the Iraq Initiative at our colleagues in Chatham House. And Renad has been good enough to take his time, time out to be with us today on this most auspicious day, which marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Baghdad. Renad will speak to us for about 20, 25 minutes or so and then we'll go to questions and answers with you our audience as ever and you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom to this stage we'll be familiar to most of you. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we'll get through as many of them as possible with Renad once he's finished his presentation. Remember that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record and please feel free to tweet about the discussion using the handle at IIEA. I've been a great pleasure of formally introducing my friend and colleague Dr Renad Mansour before handing over to him. Renad Mansour is senior research fellow and project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House. He's also senior research fellow at the American University of Iraq, Soleimani. Renad is previously a lecturer at the LSE in London, where he taught the international relations, taught about the international relations in the Middle East. Renad is also a research fellow at the Cambridge Security Initiative based at the University of Cambridge. And from 2013 he has held positions as lecturer of international studies and supervisor at the faculty of politics at Cambridge, where he also obtained his PhD at the same time that I did. So it's a great pleasure to like Renad back both given his expertise in this topic but also as a friend and colleague. Renad is the co-author of the Acclaimed Once Upon a Time in Iraq published by BBC Books and Penguin, which was to accompany the BAFTA and Emmy winning BBC series of the same name Once Upon a Time in Iraq. Renad, thanks a million for being with us for spending the time very much looking forward to your intervention. Over to you. Thank you, Barry. It's a pleasure to be here. And please do let me know if my connection drops at any point and thanks to Kian and Sarah and Andrew as well for the invitation. I've actually just left this morning throughout of BAFTA after spending about 10 days, two weeks in BAFTA in Kurdistan, other parts of the country. Trying to get a sense of where the country is 20 years, you know, since the US led invasion. And I suppose in my 20 minutes, what I want to focus on are three things. One, I want to look back at the Iraq war as a history rather than as current affairs and sort of how does revisiting some of the newslines and news stories that we became familiar with. What have we learned and how can we test all those assumptions that we held. I then want to look at how the, you know, the invasion and occupation, how it impacted Iraqis, how it impacted the region, and how it impacted, you know, to a larger extent, to a grander extent, the US, UK, European countries and this is sort of, I suppose where we'd have a good discussion with Barry and others, definitely. And the final one is, what can we learn from this massive international intervention, both in terms of, you know, what went wrong, what could have been done differently. How do those tasks, policy makers tasked with performing similar tasks, what should they heed from the lessons of the war and an occupation and international state building. So I would kind of, the way that I want to do the first section in terms of looking back at Iraq as a history is to look at three things that we often sort of consider to be big mistakes, right. The common narrative is that the US, the UK and allies went into Iraq without much of a plan, right, and sort of quick decisions became consequential. And I want to focus on three specific decisions and flush them out to understand what history tells us about it. The decision to disband the military. So, you know, oftentimes, that decision is seen as, you know, the disc, you know, Paul Bremer who became the head of the coalition provisional authority issued an order that said the military this is not just Saddam's inner circle, but the border guards police across the country, the forces, men with guns were without we had no job. And that, you know, the rule of law and order and stability crumbled and you had looting. And I want to look at that decision. I also want to look at another decision which is the decision, the second decision from the CPA, which was what became known as debathification. This idea of removing over 40,000 senior civil servants from the government, right, under the idea that they were all the inner circle of Saddam. Of course, many of them were not the inner circle of Saddam. These were teachers, doctors, civil servants who knew how ministries worked. And that decision again, consequential. And the final decision was to implement a sectarian political system based on Sunni Shi'a occurred Arab. Again, creating the grounds or the frameworks, the boundaries of conflict and fault lines politically and militarily, as we'll see in the civil war. The argument I want to make is these three decisions are often considered mistakes. But there is a logic behind them. And I want to look at why they occurred. And the UK were working with a specific group of Iraqis. These were exiled leaders. These were Iraqi leaders who were living in London, in the US, in Iran, in Syria. They had for decades not been to Iraq. They were part of what became known as the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition. And their agenda working with the US and with the support of the US was to go back to Iraq to empower themselves, because they needed social power. This is a country they're going to, and now having to claim to represent people they've never met. Right. And so I want to situate these three decisions into a bigger argument, which is to say that the Iraq, although the Iraq war was considered and was said to be regime change. It was a destruction of the state, actually. It wasn't the removal of an inner circle, as I've explained, but it was necessarily done to empower a new elite, not to empower a people. And because of that, I want to be more provocative and say that it was never meant to democratize. The goal was to empower a new leadership, show democracy through trappings like elections and constitutions and all of this quickly rushed, but fundamentally it was to empower people, foreigners coming back to a country to war. And so it was doomed to fail in terms of its democracy. So why did disbanding the military help? Because, first of all, all of these groups had a very traumatic experience in memory of Saddam Hussein's army, if you were the Kurds. And so I should explain, sorry, who this opposition groups primarily were. They were primarily Kurdish two Kurdish nationalist parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the patriarch union Kurdistan, several Shia Islamist parties primarily based in Iran, or Syria or London. And then a few secularists. But who becomes the new rulers of Iraq are the Kurdish nationalist and the Shia Islamist parties. They become the builders of this new state. Now, when they go back, when they go back to Iraq, one thing they have on their agenda is we don't want another strongman, we don't want another Saddam to come. So they're not interested in supporting, you know, they're not interested in supporting the old military, they want to disband it, because each one of them actually has their own militias. The Kurds have their Peshmerga and the Shia groups have their own militias. So they make a decision that instead of centralizing giving up our force to some kind of neo-vabarian monopoly over legitimate violence, we want to keep it because that becomes a negotiating tool for us in this new state. That's how power is negotiated. And we see time and time again, when things don't go right politically for them, they can lean on their private access to militias to keep power. Now, a consequence of that is the Iraqi armies never made strong. And so in 2014, for example, a few thousand ISIS fighters are able to take over a third of the country. And so, again, this was not state building as we would think about it. This was the empowerment of that elite in this way coercively. Now, on the second point of debathification, removing 40,000 civil servants created 40,000 new opportunities for these parties coming in to staff with loyalists. But Iraq has one of the highest national budgets in the world. It because of its oil wealth, its annual budget can become over 100 billion dollars a year. Each ministry has billions of dollars of projects and money. How do you get into that? How do you gain what's known as access corruption, the graft. You need to control senior civil servants who are in charge of procurement or contracting. And that's what happened. So removing 40,000 senior civil servants destroyed the state, but it made each one of these new leaders incredibly wealthy. They became billionaires overnight with massive access to to well. So again, there was although it seems chaotic and although it did undermine any kind of coherent state from developing. It did at the same time ensure that Iraq's new leaders would always be wealthy. Again, wanting to keep that type of power. And finally, this point of sectarianism. Now, Iraq, you know, I mean, and if you speak to a lot of people who live in Baghdad, in many cities, they'll say that they never really felt sectarianism for 2003 and there was a lot of intermarriage and all of this and I don't want to get too much into of course there's these are historical fault lines that have existed for for for centuries. But what happened in 2003 was there was a decision made to to turn the political system into one that's based on ethnic and sectarian identities. What I mean by that is that there was a specific quota for Shia for Kurds for Sunnis. So if you were, for example, part of the Communist Party, the poor Communist Party, you didn't really fit into this new model. And so many Iraqis had to figure out whether they were Sunni or Shia, the Arabs, especially in Baghdad, they had to kind of figure out what are we in order to fit into this. And this would eventually lead into these fault lines, which we see, which are the, you know, the sectarian civil war, the bombing of shrines back and forth, it becomes militarized. The logic of this, again, trying to understand why these decisions were made was these groups were coming back to Baghdad, to Basra, to these places where they had no right to representing people. They hadn't lived with them for decades and decades. How do you build an imagined sense of community that connects you to people that are beyond geography in that way and identity became important for that. So they were able to use clerics. So for example, in the first election, Grand Ayatollah Ali As-Sistani effectively endorsed the Shia block, saying everyone should vote for them so that we never become a minority again, right. So sectarianism at the time, which was considered to be representation, right, and all of this sort of UN language of having one needs to have a vote, created a toxic system of identity based politics, where your currency politically was your sect or your ethnicity. And the repercussions of that would be felt, you know, later, of course, years later down. But again, the point there is there was a logic to it. It helped fill that legitimacy crisis that many of these groups were having. So three of probably the most consequential decisions that turned the Iraq war and the invasion occupation from a regime change where you simply go in, you pick out, you know, if you are in a circle and you just replace them. But if you think about, for example, Iran, it's not like, you know, it's not a clean example but if you think of 1979 Iran, there were the protests, and then Khomeini and sort of some of the, you know, the mullahs come in. They don't remove the military the military is the same as just the picture and the you know if you're in a local police station, the picture moves from the Shah to Khomeini but the people are the same if you go to the ministries of electricity and whatever the picture changes from the Shah to Khomeini now, but the state to some extent remains intact. Of course, then there was a war that hurt it. That's not what happened in Iraq in Iraq it was destruction of the state and a failure to genuinely rebuild it. And so this takes me to another point. So, so we often think about the consequences of this. First of all, the consequences on the people. What we're most familiar with are the sort of the consequences of direct violence right so when these groups start competing specific groups are actually excluded from what becomes this elite bargain between the Kurdish nationalist and Shia Islamist groups. The biggest exclusion are the Sunnis right so now the Sunnis didn't really have political parties or mobilization. The only party they had that was a big one was the bad part, which is now no longer there you have the Islamic Party which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood a few other parties, but they were excluded right they didn't vote in the first election they boycott it, and that exclusion leads them to fight back against the system, which is why we have the emergence initially of Al Qaeda in Iraq, followed by the Islamic State of Iraq and then followed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant so this is all the networks that represent the vacuum created by excluding Sunnis from the initial elite bargain that would create this new state that I described in those three big ways. Another group that was excluded, initially, were the Sadrists, because Muqtada al-Sadr was based in Iraq he wasn't in exile or in the opposition. This was a religious populist movement of poor urban Iraqis that emerged in the 1990s with his father, and he takes over after his father is assassinated in 1999. The Sadrists also launched an insurgency against the system, both against the new Iraqi leaders that have come from abroad, as well as against the Americans in 2006 leading to a civil war, internal Shia civil war, which ends in the Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki defeats the Sadrists, but what happens critically is since then the Sadrists are put into the system. So the Sadrists now are part of the siphoning off of state coffers and dividing of power and all of that. The Sadrists now become part of the system. And years later, another group of people that are excluded from this are a growing youth population. Iraq has one of the highest birth rates in the region, and it has one of the highest youth populations, almost two thirds of Iraqis are under 25. So that means a big majority of the country don't actually remember anything before Sadr. So what happens is as they easily build the system, they start building their patronage networks. The demand of demographics makes it hard for them to continue including everyone and following the oil pressure 2014, you have protests and again in 2019, 20 you have the Tashreen movement, which are protesters from, you know, primarily Baghdad in the south saying we are not included in this. The regime is no longer able to use ideological or economic power. It's become bankrupt in both ways because of how expansive this is. And it's therefore leans more on violence and kills protesters and Iraq has become a more dangerous place today because of it. Link to that, the consequences on people, as I mentioned the civil wars, obviously ISIS and terrorism. These are the visible but there's also invisible types of violence that a system of corruption has created. And I'll just give you one example to make that point. So on the Ministry of Health. There is a specific agency called Kimadia. Kimadia has a budget of $1 billion a year, and its job is to ensure that medication in Iraq is good. So we did research into this, and we found that 70 to 80% of medication Iraq is either expired or fake. So although there's a budget there to ensure medication. It's being siphoned off as I mentioned for the economic interest of this elite at the expense of people's health. Now it's hard to quantify how many people have died, because there's not medical there's no medication, or there's no clean water, or there's no electricity, or these different markers of structural violence. I do think it's striking to note that Iraq is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world. So clearly that disconnect is linked to these larger forms of structural violence that we need to be aware of because, you know, your body counts and count the bodies of people who have been killed by civilian casualties and through wars, but there's a bigger part and this is how you you only feel this when you spend time in Iraq, doing ethnographic research. The final point I want to look at is the kind of the role of internationals and all of this. And, you know, I sort of focus a lot of my comments on this Iraqi new elite coming in but of course they were supported, funded and encouraged by the US the UK. And at different points you know the US literally built a green zone for this elite so that it could be excluded from the rest of the population. The US protected them from the rest of the population, so the UK the CPA that they all did. Time and time again what we've seen in the last 20 years are international actors doubling down on the incumbent settling for short term status quo, even if that is at the risk of longer term problems, because the US and UK are, you know, from the beginning we're more interested in their own home audiences. How do you show, you know, if we're not finding weapons of mass destruction, if we're not finding these flimsy links to Al Qaeda. The last thing that we can do is prove that it became a democracy. So let's quickly have elections. Let's quickly have a constitution, these trappings of democracy. At the same time, let's not get into the complicated issues of corruption let's not get into the complications of human rights abuses and torture and time and time again. And you know I've written on this recently the US the UK have turned the other way when given reports of human rights abuses by allies in the Iraqi government, because that they just want to get on with the current you know if you're an ambassador for example and you're on for over 30 years, you just you know your job is to make sure nothing goes wrong, and you sort of muddle through the status quo so that you're on your way to Doha or Saudi Arabia or another ambassador ship. And you know I'm being provocative here but I have sort of you know over the years have been part of this. So what could have been done differently then and this is a huge question is rather than continuing relying on these incumbents where there was the Iraqi in 2010, the US and UK supported him although he had lost an election and that led to the emergence of ISIS. More recently they supported most of the economy and other reports coming out that he will you know his anti corruption committee was torturing people. Instead of supporting these personalities, there needed to be more done for two things one, actually getting from the beginning getting the opinions of people town halls, going around the country and local leaders not simply working with exiles and you know, if you look at the US in many countries today Venezuela, Iran, recently Syria. There is this sort of exiled community that that becomes both the and analysts for Western countries, but also a potential, you know allies if there is regime change. And in Iraq lesson teaches us that that that becomes problematic. And so what should have been done was the US and the CPA should have gone around Iraq and asked you to run it. Do you want an ethno sectarian political system, or do you want something else. Who are the leaders, right, because what this this taxi driver from London surely isn't as representative as someone who has lived with with people maybe he is but we need to try it. And so that becomes a huge thing, getting the, the, the, you know, support the people, but to ensuring that institutions remain strong and time and time again it was personalities, who could be my person, right. I understand it was the same question whether it was Rani or Karzai doesn't matter if you're proper that's our person and there's good guys and bad guys. Iraq it was the same it was my like he called them it's always this is our person right now. And he and it's always a he will push through our interests. We've just come at the expense of state institutions, which have become incoherent. And so as we begin to think of the legacies of the Iraq war what we can learn. You know, a lot of these lessons, had they have been applied, and you know, 20 years ago today I think it's hard to say whether it'd be successful but certainly you know, Iraqis who were, you know, and I think this is an important point to end on. Most Iraqis were pro war. Right. And I think we forget that. But life under Saddam was brutal. He was a dictator the sanctions were brutal, both because of him and because of the international regime. And they will have never imagined that went through the next 20 years they would have multiple civil wars the rise of genocidal groups like ISIS, and all of the challenges that they faced. And so I think you know it's unfair to ask Iraqis to this false dichotomy of whether it was better before or with or without Saddam I think that's unfair. But I do think it's important to note that there was an opportunity that clearly like was was was was completely mishandled. Yeah, I'll end it at that.