Washington now opposes having Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani take a second term as prime minister. The U.S. Embassy in Iraq explains that Sudani’s government has failed to prevent militia attacks carried out on or from Iraqi territory. Some of the militiamen in question carry official identification and are on the official payroll.
Such blunt language suggests that Washington finally may learn a lesson it avoided for years. After repeated human and materiel losses, and after damage to the reputation of its military and diplomatic institutions, the United States now may recognize that Iraq’s crisis is a problem of not only armed factions but also the political order that preserved and protected them.
Washington moved from building the system to protecting it, even as Iranian influence expanded inside the system itself.
Two approaches shaped U.S. policy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The first relied on Islamist parties and Kurdish forces that organized prior to President Saddam Hussein’s fall and assumed the void as a ready-made political alternative. These forces embraced a logic of power and patronage rather than reconstruction. Washington, however, looked past the fact that they represented narrow partisan interests more than they represented Iraqis; many were loyal to Iran.
The second approach began after the 2011 U.S. withdrawal. Washington moved from building the system to protecting it, even as Iranian influence expanded inside the system itself, filling the vacuum at the expense of the state and sovereignty.
The policies and loyalties of the ruling parties deepened divisions from which the Islamic State emerged. Its defeat was costly. Iraqis’ confidence in their state continued to shrink. This anger exploded openly during the 2019 Tishrin Movement, named for the Arabic month roughly coinciding with October. Young Iraqis staged sit-ins, with the slogans “We want a homeland!” and “Iran out, out!” The response of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s government, or the militias upon which it refused to crack down, was repression and assassination.
Washington, meanwhile, reacted with statements but did not move beyond verbal pressure. While Abdul-Mahdi resigned and Iraqis appointed intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi as interim prime minister, there was short-term calm but no real reform. Contracts and cash passed through the hands of different aides, but the same corruption and militia empowerment continued. Populist Muqtada al-Sadr’s boycott of elections and then his marginalization in formal political structures further created the sense of disenfranchisement among ordinary Iraqis.
As this unfolded, Washington continued to protect the system. Militias attacked American soldiers, targeted embassies, and threatened investments, but then retreated under the protection of the government the U.S. legitimized. The factions understood that Washington might kill a commander here and there but would not endanger the system that cultivated the militias.
Today, however, this equation may be changing. What comes next in Iraq may not be localized strikes seeking revenge against specific commanders, but a recognition that the whole system nurturing them must change—especially if Secretary of State Marco Rubio concludes that its continuation has become more dangerous to U.S. interests than the cost of undermining it.
The greatest risk, of course, is that some parties, with Iranian backing, may resort to force and try to push Iraq toward civil conflict.
A genuine shift would require rethinking Washington’s relationship with the parties that monopolized the state, covered for armed actors, and tied Iraq more deeply to Iran. A new approach, therefore, would not begin by imposing a ready-made alternative from outside, but by lifting protection from the forces that monopolized the state.
This could take the form of support for new judges and nationalist security commanders capable of activating state institutions and restoring their function, thereby opening wider space for accountability against the networks of corruption, smuggling, and coercion that have sustained the dominant parties. The U.S. State Department and the Pentagon might work, even for a limited period, with forces and figures not tied to militias or the political quota system. While existing politicians—the Malikis, Barzanis, and Halbousis—might complain, U.S. officials should recognize that such changes would enjoy broad public support across sectarian lines.
The greatest risk, of course, is that some parties, with Iranian backing, may resort to force and try to push Iraq toward civil conflict. But that is akin to a choice between a heart attack and stage IV cancer, without recognizing the best option is preventive medicine.
Iraq can never succeed and will always remain under Iran’s thumb so long as U.S. inaction allows militias and mafias the conditions that make violence effective. Even if such a confrontation were to occur, it would be unlikely to last long, as the marja’iyya, the leading Shi’i authorities in Najaf, reject the current corruption and likely would support new choices around whom the public could rally.
