There were elections in Iraq and little was said about them, which means that the return to a certain normality for a country that for decades was in the spotlight is probably confirmed, and for the worst reasons. It is even curious that three more or less recent news, but in other geographies, recall in some way that time when Iraq filled the television news and occupied many pages of the newspapers, whether through the war against Iran that lasted almost the entire 1980s, through the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, through the strength of Al-Qaeda and then the Islamic State taking advantage of the initial chaos that followed American military intervention.
This news more or less linked to the Iraqi past was the visit to the White House by Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who in 2003 joined Islamist groups in Iraq and was arrested by the Americans; the death of Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice president and considered the main mastermind of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and, perhaps less noticed, the promotion by General Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan strongman, of his son Saddam, to a high military position, with the young Haftar being born in 1991, the year of the liberation of Kuwait by an international coalition led by the United States, and was named in honor of the Iraqi leader, who saw his troops expelled from the small emirate, but prevented George Bush (Bush Sr.) from advancing to Baghdad. Cheney in that Administration was Secretary of Defense, and even today there is speculation whether the 2003 attack on Iraq was not for Bush Jr. to finish the work left incomplete by Bush Sr., even if it was part of the “War on Terror” launched in reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington.
Since the fall of Saddam, who was later captured and executed, Iraq has sought to rebuild itself. The Americans, alleging Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, managed to replace the Baath party dictatorship with a democracy, but it has to deal with a country that may correspond to ancient Mesopotamia, but was artificially created by the British taking advantage of the end of the Ottoman Empire, more or less a century ago. Three former provinces obedient to the sultan in Istanbul were united, although one was majority Kurdish, another Sunni Arab and the third Shiite Arab. So evident is this complicated sum imposed from outside, and its persistence, that the attempt to build post-Saddam democracy had to provide, via tacit understanding, that the Prime Minister will be a Shiite, the President of Parliament a Sunni and the President of the Republic, an essentially protocol position, a Kurd.
In these recent legislative elections, the most voted force was the party of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, which, however, will have to look for partners for a government coalition between Shiite parties, like yours, various Sunni parties, Kurdish parties and so on, and within the ethno-religious communities there are different ideologies, such as that of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite party, which called for a boycott of the elections and is seen as close to Iran. Task al-Sudani’s is therefore complicated, but, taking into account that post-2003 Iraq has already had to defeat the Islamic State jihadists and counter Kurdish separatism, it is not impossible.
Al-Sudani has shown political and governance capacity in recent years, transforming the country into a construction site that allows oil money to be invested and managing with tweezers the relationship with its two allies, the United States and Iran, enemies of each other as seen in the brief war fought in 2025. Staying out of the turmoil in the Middle East is a priority for those who govern in Baghdad.
These were the sixth legislative elections in Iraq since the end of Saddam’s dictatorship. In a way, for that reason alone they deserved to be in the news.
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias