Opinion: Iraq’s president explains why the U.S. must reengage with Baghdad
Iraqi President Barham Salih in Rome in November 2018. By Christian Caryl Christian Caryl Editor with The Post's Opinions section Email Bio Follow Op-ed Editor/International March 20 at 11:37 AM Barham Salih, the president of Iraq, greeted me this month in his family home in the city of Sulaymaniyah, about 40 miles from the Iranian border.
“If you ask me, is the Iraqi government bureaucracy successful? Absolutely not,” he told me. “Is the Iraqi state succeeding? I think there are some prospects for this country to be moving in the right direction. But the legacies of the past, the problems are really, really monumental.
Think about that for a moment. Iraq — the country identified in American minds with chaos and endless warfare — is a democracy. Citizens vote, and leaders must respond to their demands; otherwise, they won’t be reelected. It’s a deeply flawed democracy, to be sure, as Salih is the first to note. Yet its institutions, created after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, have endured. Iraqis routinely take to the streets to demonstrate.
To be sure, there is a major impediment to improved relations between Iraq and the United States — and that is Iran’s growing power in its neighbor to the west. The fight against the Islamic State has left Iranian-sponsored militias, the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces, in a position to dominate Iraq’s security. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is threatening to sanction Iraqi Shiite militias and Iraqi politicians with Iranian ties, a policy almost certain to backfire.
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