The Side Effect of Regime Change in Iraq: The Absence of Integration for Rebuilding the State in Post-Saddam Iraq, 2003 to 2009

Abstract

On October 29 2009, CNN reported that Iraq’s national elections would be delayed because the nation’s lawmakers failed to assemble an official session to adopt an election law. Too few politicians were present to form a quorum. This was mainly because of disagreements over voters’ apportionment and their registries among the Kurds, Arabs and Turks in Kirkuk. The elections were supposed to be held on 16 January 2010 and the constitutional deadline for the elections was January 31 2010. Iraq’s election commission needed more than 90 days to carry out elections after the passage of the election law. Indeed, the Iraqi national elections delayed because of the failure of the official session (Tawfeeq & Jamjoom 2009). The delayed Iraq’s national elections in 2009 meant that the Shiite dominated Iraq was not working well enough to establish the state in terms of the Iraqis’ political disagreements among ethno-religious groups. In addition to the Iraqi political disagreements, Arab Spring of 2010 played a decisive role in weakening the Iraqis’ cohesion as well as bringing chaos to Iraq and its neighbors since then. During the period from 2003 to 2009, regime change the Iraqi Shiites by the US and the failure of the Iraqi national elections in terms of three major ethno-religious groups had negative effects on the Iraqi and its neighbors’ political situations. In this sense, the political troubles emerged from regime change under the name of democratization, regional concerns with neighbors and political components for rebuilding the state should have been solved in that period. As the majority of the Iraqis, the Shiites had been handicapped by the political and economic systems established by the British authorities and the monarchy since 1932. From the perspective of the Ba’th regime, they did not represent a uniform community and common attitude toward the regime. Even though the Shiites were diversified and paid more attention to economic and political factors than to religious ones, the Shiite Ulama played a strong role in defining their religious identity (Cleveland 2004, 411). In both 1977 and 1979, there were large-scale anti-government demonstrations with three discontent movements led by the Ulama, al Da’wa (Islamic Call), and its followers. This religious discontent focused on the secularism of the Ba’th regime, the discrimination of the Shiites by commissioning government officials in the higher echelon and the regime’s attempts to control all organizations and religious institutions in Iraq. As a result, Saddam’s regime arrested many members of al Da’wa and executed a prestigious leader of the Ulama in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran appealed to Islamic revolution in the same year. In spite of Ayatollah’s appeal to the Iraqi Shiites, the Shiite disloyalty toward the regime was one of the elements to give rise to the Iran – Iraq war in 1980.