 March 20th marked the 19th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The disastrous and brutal attack destroyed Iraqi society, led to the death and injury of millions and the displacement of many more. The U.S. invasion set the stage for the destabilization of an entire region and conflicts that affected the entire world. All of this happened on the basis of a lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Nineteen years after this invasion, where does Iraq stand today? Rania Khalik of Breakthrough News explains. On the one hand, Iraq is one of the few democracies in the Middle East with more freedom of expression than most countries that has a plethora of news organizations, seemingly for every province and sometimes even for cities, with an active and strong civil society, a powerful and diverse social media. It has its own pop stars who are famous throughout the Arab world. It's where Lebanese pop stars even perform. And it has its own unique culture backed by the wealth that it possesses as a country. And it has a thriving nightlife, international food chains, fancy restaurants, amusement parks. I mean, these are things that you see if you spend time in Iraq. But that said, Iraq is also massively corrupt with a frightening gap between its billionaires and its conspicuous displays of grotesque wealth alongside terrible, terrible poverty with people living without sewage or electricity or employment or any real future prospects. Iraq cities are very safe in terms of a crime, but rule of law is very weak. And there are multiple parties competing for power, but none of them really stand for anything or have any projects meant to advance the lives of most Iraqis. At most, they just want to seize control of this or that ministry and get contracts, steal what they can, maybe they'll let it trickle down through patronage networks to provide employment opportunities for their supporters, but that's about as far as it goes. And of course, Iraq is totally reliant on oil production and state employment. There's actually little private sector activity in Iraq and almost nothing left of its former socialism, actually nothing at all left of its former socialism except, you know, so few, you know, state run enterprises apart from oil. And people, most people in Iraq, when you talk to them, they really dream of obtaining a job with the government, often in the security forces that's, you know, rarely in any sector that produces anything. So there's this bloated and useless class of state employees in Iraq and this buys social peace for now, but you can't just hire the entire country and hope that oil prices will stay high because they'll eventually crash and oil will become less valuable, inevitably. And then there's global warming, which will make much of Iraq unlivable and its agricultural sector is already dying and the country is at risk of further desertification. And all this means, you know, millions more unemployed and without prospect, you know, angry and hungry and potentially violent, but lacking in any kind of ideology to mobilize them. So just these occasional social explosions that we see in a lot of places around the world, but contained by a combination of handouts and violent suppression. And of course, that's if we forget the trauma of the last 19 years since the invasion and nearly every Iraqi experienced that invasion, but most Iraqis don't actually remember life before the American invasion and what it was like under Saddam because the population is so young. So those who can remember life before the Americans would have experienced over a decade of sanctions that impoverished them and destroyed any dreams of a future, you know, anything but beyond subsistence and force them to depend on the state for survival. You know, we know that the middle class fled, educated people fled. People became more tribal, more religious. And during this period, the Americans bombed every so often destroying Iraq's infrastructure, its power stations, its factories. And of course, then the Americans invaded and many Iraqis remember this and this killed more people up to, you know, the invasion and occupation of Iraq killed, you know, an estimated one million Iraqis. And that's probably an underestimate. That's a lot of people. It destroyed the state. It led to chaos, violence, militias, looting, just total and utter chaos, a civil war. You know, the country never recovered from this. And a lot of those developments still play out in Iraqi politics and society today. The U.S. empowered death squads, you know, tens of thousands endured American prisons and torture and humiliation. Thousands of innocent civilians were killed by the Americans. And that's in addition to tens of thousands of Iraqis who were fighting the occupation, whether they were Al Qaeda or other militias that were roaming the streets of the time, you know, bodies piled up in Iraq and empty lots and on sidewalks and sectarianism and extremism increased as the Americans created winners and losers in Iraqi society. And that that led to the rise of ISIS. You know, we know that the U.S. behavior policies, occupation of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and then Shia militias in response to defeat ISIS and then further conflict with America. And while ISIS, you know, ISIS, of course, has been militarily defeated and controls no territory, it's still threatens Iraqis in remote villages and mountains till this day. And of course, that's not even to speak of the millions of Iraqis who were displaced. You know, many of them have never returned. And without Iraq and its sectarian war, we wouldn't have seen the Syrian civil war develop as it did, which led to more refugees and the rise of the radical right in Europe and Brexit and Trump. And I could go on and on and on. But it's really important when we talk about the U.S. war on Iraq that we recognize that it wasn't just isolated to Iraq. This rippled across the region and shattered the Middle East in a way that hasn't ever been repaired and is, again, still playing out today. And then, of course, you know, there is the issue of Kurdistan. The Kurdistan, the Kurdish region of Iraq and in the north has been, of course, relatively peaceful and stable by comparison. But it is divided between two tribal family dictators who are massively corrupt and that's even by regional standards and whose population is poor and desperate and lacks freedom. And so they flee and end up drowning in the English Channel or freeze in the forests between Belarus and Poland. And so that's like the desperate, really tragic and horrible state of affairs in Iraq that is all, you know, all goes back to this crime of the century that was the U.S. invasion of a sovereign country to overthrow its government in 2003. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq continues to remain a sore point for many in the country. While the U.S. has declared that combat operations are over, soldiers remain in the country in support roles. This has led to large scale opposition from various groups, including militia, that are part of the popular mobilization forces. How has the opposition to the presence of U.S. forces developed over the years? Meanwhile, Iraq's political crisis continues unabated. Elections held in October last year have still not led to the formation of a government. While cleric Muktada al-Sadr remains the key figure in Iraqi politics, the future is uncertain. What is the prospect for government formation in Iraq? You know, the Iraqi parliament voted after the U.S. assassinated the Iraqi or Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who, and alongside him, was killed the Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The Iraqi parliament, after that happened, voted for U.S. troops to leave their country. And while most while the U.S. has withdrawn troops from Iraq, there does remain a situation where there's like the U.S. is constantly trying to play this game of war against Iran inside Iraqi territory and constantly trying to dictate to Iraq how Iraq should deal with the popular mobilization forces, which were the quote unquote Shia militias, as the U.S. calls them, that were formed in response to the rise of ISIS to defeat ISIS and were then folded into the Iraqi military or the Iraqi security structure and still exist today. And they exist. They call themselves the resistance and they view themselves largely as resisting as being a part of the axis of resistance across the Middle East as being allied, not just with the Iranians, but also with Lebanese Hezbollah, with the Syrians, increasingly with the Palestinian cause that has actually like been something that after Israel's war on Palestine last year, you saw more Iraqis starting to care about that for a long time. Iraq had its own issues. So like Palestine was very far removed from the minds of many Iraqis. So that like many war is still playing out today. I mean, many war, it's like kind of like a cold war inside of Iraq that every once in a while turns into a hot war as we and we see that not just from the American side, but also, you know, Iran does have interest in Iraq as well. And there are bases, you know, U.S. bases in Iraq and, you know, there's also Iranians claim they hit Israeli and Israeli base in Iraq last, you know, a few weeks ago. So there is this ongoing sort of U.S. provocation of Iran that ends up playing out in Iraq. And there that ends up causing issues inside Iraq in terms of what side they want to take. And like there's this view of Iran versus the U.S. and Gulf states and people in power end up collaborating like saying they want to collaborate or not saying that they want to collaborate with the West or be closer to the Gulf states for money. So this kind of situation ends up basically taking advantage as well as the of the corruption that exists in Iraqi politics. And one thing that I didn't mention, by the way, when I mentioned all of that sort of corruption that exists in the Iraqi state, much of that corruption was learned from the Americans who helped set up that state. And oftentimes you'll hear Americans in Western pundits and think tankers when they're giving their analysis of Iraq to talk about Iraq being extremely corrupt country. It's so corrupt, which it is absolutely. But what they always fail to mention is that a lot of that corruption was taught to them by the people who helped set up that state from the Pentagon. At the end of the day of the Iraqi political formation, however, it turns out, which kind of seems to be stuck right now, similar to Lebanon. But it does seem to be stuck right now. However, it works out. It's the overall political structures that we've talked about before are not going to change. The Iraqi system that exists as it does will continue. And you'll continue to have these patronage networks. You'll continue to have this situation where, you know, this or that official like buys their, you know, office where they steal from state coffers and where people kind of feel hopeless because no part again, you know, there's no party really has any sort of ideology that seeks to dismantle what's at the root of much of these problems, which is this sort of like capitalist, hegemonic system that's tightly connected to imperialism that has just hollowed out the Iraqi economy and left it in this state and the people who continue to gain power or to win elections, people like Wiktorah Sutter, they have a stake in maintaining this system, even if they say they don't. And so as long as people like that are in charge, it's not going to change.