Marsin Alshamary is a faculty associate in Boston College’s Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, where she researches and teaches about Middle Eastern politics, focusing on democracy, religious institutions, civil society, and political movements in Iraq. She is also a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Her work has been published and referenced in both academic journals and mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post and Reuters. She has also used her expertise to consult for organizations like the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, and the World Bank.
Mira Mehta: Within the United States, the American intervention in Iraq is considered a policy failure by most people on both sides of the aisle. What do you think the United States misunderstood about democratization in Iraq that contributed to this failure?
Marsin Alshamary: So two things—I preface this by saying that everyone in the United States thinks about Iraq solely through the prism of the war, and even 20 years after the war, this colors the way that Americans, both at the policy level and citizen level, think about the country. And it really contrasts starkly with how Iraqis think about their country because most Iraqis were born around the time of the war, like shortly before. So their formative years weren’t the American invasion; they were after that. And that really colors the way they look at their country, which is much more forward-looking and oriented toward dealing with problems that exist in Iraq, not as having necessarily stemmed from the invasion. Whether or not they did stem from the invasion is another question entirely.
So I think since you started this conversation by talking about writing for an American audience. I do want to preface all this by saying that, on the ground in Iraq, it’s a completely different perspective. There’s no real debate anymore about the legality of the war for Iraqis; it doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve moved on. We have a country that was built on an invasion and occupation, and now we have to live with the real-life repercussions of that. That’s on one hand.
On the other hand—things that the United States missed when it came to democratization—I think the United States missed a lot in Iraq. I’ve said this in other venues before, but it’s quite astounding to me how many smart people were involved who made really surprising, rookie mistakes. For one, the idea that you could go in and change the regime—in a country that’s so ethnically and religiously diverse and that’s been under a strong centralized authoritarian dictatorship for so long—and expect that there wouldn’t be pockets of instability, there wouldn’t be surprising resistance, and that there wouldn’t be civil war or violence internally. I think there was an expectation that this would happen, but I don’t think anyone really understood the degree to which it happened.
The other thing that I think Americans didn’t understand at the time, and I think they continue to fail to understand, is that democracy in the Middle East, whether in Iraq or not, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be pro-America or pro-West. It just means that it’s going to represent the will of the people of that country. But I think the United States went along with the idea that the will of the people of that country would somehow be pro-America or pro-West. And I see the United States continuously make this mistake in the Middle East of associating a democratic country with one that’s strongly allied to and supportive of the United States, which isn’t always the case and shouldn’t be expected.
MM: Given these misunderstandings, what do you think US political leaders should take away from Iraq’s political development in the aftermath of the intervention as they consider future policy in the region?
MA: I mean, the United States really is at a crossroads right now. If we had done this interview a little bit over a month ago, I think we would be having a little bit of a different conversation because, in the last few years, the United States had been moving toward really leaving the Middle East to its own devices at the sort of status quo that they were at. They would intervene every now and then diplomatically and politically, but not necessarily militarily ever again, and that was the appetite in Washington and the kind of idea we got in the region.
Of course, there was the Soleimani killing, but outside of that, there was the context of the constant squabbles between the axis of resistance in the United States and their bases, and even that was a sort of stable back and forth. Now we’re a lot less certain of the future of the region in general, which makes me a little hesitant because we genuinely don’t know what developments will look like. There are big fears of instability from the conflict in Palestine and Israel spreading across borders, particularly to Lebanon, and then activating this network of the axis of resistance that I just spoke of. That would probably necessitate the United States to behave more directly.
But even in light of all this, if you think back to what happened in Iraq, there have been different narratives about it. There have been people who were supportive of the war, who will look at Iraq now and say George Bush is more or less vindicated for what he did. What we ended up having in Iraq could be a lot worse. It’s more or less a country that still has relations with the United States and with Iran but has pretty regular elections, although there’s a big question mark about the quality of that democracy. But their perspective is that it could be worse.
There are others, of course. I think exactly the opposite—that what ended up happening is that the United States basically presented Iraq to Iran on the gold plate and really changed the balance of power in the region without really thinking about it. So the moral of the story is that any kind of intervention has a lot of unintended consequences. And going forth, the United States should probably be prudent about the unintended consequences that arise as a result of interventions, whether military, political, or diplomatic.
MM: As you touched upon, over the past two decades, Iraq has worked to develop its own democratic institutions. What do you think is the biggest strength of Iraq’s democracy?
MA: In Iraq today, it’s still possible for someone who isn’t from the political elite to run for parliament. You saw in the most recent elections in 2021 that there was a whole wave of new political parties that were formed after a protest movement. There were a lot of independents who ran for office. The possibility of reform from within is still something that exists in Iraq. Some elections in Iraq are better than others, but the most recent election has been one that was praised by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and by EU observers in Iraq.
Another strength is the relative freedom of speech compared to other countries in the Middle East. I always say this with a bit of a cautionary note in the end because there have been increasing red lines in recent years, but compared to other countries that I’m familiar with in the region, there is space to discuss politics, to criticize the government, and to hold events discussing policy. I think that’s something that’s very positive and also something that can be lost easily. So I try to emphasize it because I want people to feel proud of it and protective of it.
MM: What is the biggest challenge to Iraqi democracy? And what do you think should be prioritized, either within Iraq or by supporters and international institutions, to help respond to those challenges?
MA: A lot of people tend to bundle all the challenges that face Iraq into one pile and not really separate challenges to democracy from challenges to Iraq’s well-being as a country or its performance. For context, if you just generally ask this question to anyone who is well-versed in Iraq, I think people would unanimously agree that the biggest issues are corruption and ensuring the economic future of the country right now. Maybe this would surprise an American audience—it’s not security. Actually, Baghdad is a very safe city. You could walk around freely, and I’ve had numerous friends who are visibly American who visited me when I lived there and had a very normal experience.
If we’re talking particularly about democracy, I think one of the biggest challenges facing Iraq is that there’s a lot of apathy from youth about it. This comes from different reasons. One of them is that the population of Iraq is very young. The average Iraqi is 21 years old. They don’t have the memory of authoritarianism, and so they, rightfully, have very high standards of what democracy looks like and frequently tend to react to anything short of that by boycotting democratic mechanisms or by boycotting elections specifically. That tends to empower status quo elite parties and really just perpetuate the cycle that these youth are angry about because it allows the same people to have positions of power.
Then the youth say, “They’re illegitimate. We didn’t vote for them.” But they also have refused to participate consistently. And it’s not just participation as voters. It’s also participation in the many other things that really feed a democracy—participation in running for office, participation in civil society, participation in volunteerism, and a lot of these social capital things that we can think of. I truly hope that they don’t lose all faith in the possibility of reforming Iraq’s political system from within. I saw that in the last protest movement, there was tension between people who thought the only way forward was to have a revolution and start from zero versus those who thought, “Look, we still have some mechanisms that we can work within.”
If the revolutionaries win over the reformists, I genuinely don’t see a revolution happening in Iraq that ends in democracy. So, I myself have been cautioning against revolutions because I do think there are plenty of cautionary tales in the region. Particularly in the context of Iraq, where there are still existing institutions like elections, like freedom of speech, I think we don’t have to hit that point of despair quite yet.
MM: How do you think that the way the public, and particularly youth, are reacting to disappointments from democratic institutions in Iraq compares to the way that people react to these types of disappointments in the rest of the world?
MA: From the way that Iraq has kind of moved on past the war, it is starting to look a lot like other countries in the region in terms of the way people talk about politics and interact with them. The protest movements in Iraq that happened and the kinds of rhetoric of new parties really mirror the kinds of things that we’ve seen happen in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt. I’ll give you one example that seems very novel in Iraq, but when you look outside of the region, you’ll see there’s a precedent for this.
Because of the poor performance of the Islamist governments for basically the past 20 years, there’s been this anti-Islamist sentiment among the electorate in Iraq. As a response to that, the new protest parties that have formed—the ones that in any other world would have been Islamist parties—now reframe themselves as “civil parties” similar to the way that the Ennahda party of Tunisia framed itself. Or they’ll say they’re a conservative democratic party similar to the way the Justice and Development Party defines itself in Turkey. So there have been a lot of similarities across the region, and a lot of it is driven by how youth perceive the role of Islamists, for example. There have also been other similarities in the anti-establishment nature of protests and the decentralized nature of protests, very much mirroring movements in Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, and more.
So those are Iraq’s ties to the region, but even looking at the world more broadly, I think a lot of youth populations have grown very skeptical of politicians in general. And I think Iraq is no exception. This big anti-establishment push extends beyond the Middle East. I think it does fuel a lot of populism on one hand, which is more of a negative thing. But on the other hand, it also fuels a lot of civil society and innovative thinking about the way that we want the world to look in the future and challenges status quo ideas, particularly as we confront things that affect the entire world, like global warming.
MM: You talked a lot about protest movements. How can we distinguish between movements that are likely to produce revolution and ones that are going to work within the existing structure?
MA: I think it’s very hard to tell someone who is young, unemployed, feeling demeaned by the country they live in, and feeling not represented by the politicians who rule them that they should think about slowly changing things from within the system. It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you that it’s better for Iraq to go through reform and that it’s less likely to be destabilizing than revolution. I can be completely right about it, but still, there’s an aspect of humans having to live through these changes—it’s easy to sit at a distance and talk about what’s best for our country, but really hard in that moment. I always say that the political life of a country is so much longer than the life of an individual.
The way that everyday people practice politics and their engagement with politics, they’re not going to look at their country and say, “Okay, so 20 years and still standing. That must mean my grandchildren will have an okay life.” I don’t think that we can expect people to feel that way about politics, and understandably, because they should have a baseline of services. At the same time, there’s always a group of people within revolutionary movements who actually do have this vision, possibly because of the nature of their work. Maybe they’re civil society activists, or maybe they’re law professors; those are the kinds of people you sometimes encounter in these movements. Other people tend to look at them, the public figures who speak on television, who do interviews, for guidance and for support.
I think it’s the role of those people to be able to speak about what’s good for the country in the long term and to give that kind of advice. In settings where those people are respected and have space to speak, you see that they can move more people toward trying out a reformist platform. In cases where those people feel like they can’t speak for one reason or another, or maybe they themselves have reached such a moment of deep dissatisfaction that they’re pessimistic about reform, then you tend to go down more of the revolutionary and attempted revolutionary path.
MM: What role do you think civil society can play in helping to develop a democracy and responding to some of the challenges you’ve described?
MA: Civil society has a particular relationship with democracy that people are unsure of. We’re not quite sure whether civil society produces democracy or democracy produces civil society because we’ve seen both happen. On the one hand, civil society in the Middle East has frequently taken on the role of the state by providing services. That incentivizes authoritarian leaders to leave civil society in place because it affords them a kind of stability in the country. That shouldn’t really be its role. It shouldn’t be a crutch for ineffective government. In its ideal form, civil society fosters democracy by allowing citizens to engage in democratic practices like advocating, choosing leaders, expressing themselves, coordinating, and communicating.
That’s one way that they can actually create leaders who can become political leaders. In Iraq’s case and Lebanon’s case, there are a lot of reformist political figures who have emerged from civil society. The other role that civil society plays is that it can educate people and provide a means of information during times of uncertainty and crisis.
The issue with civil society is that this also ties to the economic component. A country has to have a certain level of economic prosperity to start thinking about some of the values of civil society that the West really prioritizes. So when the United States goes into a country that’s reeling from civil conflict and wants a group to focus on women’s rights and human rights and democratization, that’s great in theory. In practice, these groups are going to be so dependent on the United States for any of their activities that they’re not really an organic grassroots organization that arose from the needs of the community. And that’s because the community has more pressing needs.
For civil society to truly be at its most effective, it has to be organic from within the community itself. But that’s not to say that the kinds of organizations that the United States supports in the Middle East have had no impact on prospects for internal reform. I think they do have that. Their only problem is that they’re very much dependent on the United States for survival.
MM: Another factor that is often discussed alongside democracy in the Middle East is religion. Can you talk a little bit about what the role of Shia leaders has been in Iraq’s transition to democracy?
MA: It depends on which Shia leader you’re talking about. The religious establishment, which is not a political establishment at all, but just the spiritual guide for the Shia Muslims of Iraq and outside of Iraq, is centered around the figure of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. His role since 2003 has really been as a caretaker, directing people toward democratic mechanisms. He was the one who pushed for elections in Iraq far sooner than the Americans wanted to host them for a constitution-writing committee that was representative of Iraqis. He pushed people to vote in elections and has frequently done so. When protests happened in Iraq, he suggested that the prime minister step down and that people get a new electoral law so that they were able to go to the polls again. During the ISIS war, he basically mobilized civilians in the war against ISIS. During Iraq’s sectarian civil war, he was adamant that the Shia community would treat the Sunni community with respect and care and would not devolve into civil war. Sadly, this was not heeded, but his role has been that of a caretaker who really tries to steer Iraq away from chaos and has been accepting of Iraq’s attempt at democracy for the most part, but that’s just one figure amongst many Shia figures.
Then you have Shia Islamist parties of various kinds that have monopolized the political scene. You have the Sadrist Movement, which transitioned from being an insurgency against American occupation to a political movement that ran for office. So on the political scene, I think Iraq’s Shia leaders are really no less pragmatic than any other political leaders in the world, and they try to keep close ties to Iran, but they try to also not lose their relationship with the United States. I don’t think that’s surprising, but I think an American audience and American policymakers do wish that they were not as close to Iran as they are.
MM: What do you think is the main difference between the role that religion plays in Iraqi politics as opposed to American politics?
MA: I think people tend to say the United States is a secular country and ignore the many ways in which religion actually plays a role in American life. In the United States, laws differ state by state and city by city, and there’s tremendous variation in the way that certain rules that derive from religion are enforced or are not enforced. The United States isn’t a country that’s secular in the way that France or Turkey aspire to be. People frequently say that the United States is a place where there is freedom of religion rather than freedom from religion.
I think the same is true for Iraq. There is freedom of religion, but even among Iraq’s secularists, there is still a conservative strand that is associated with the way that the practice of religion has permeated society rather than maybe the belief of it. I think that’s where there are some similarities with the United States. I would say Iraq is definitely closer to the United States than to the Anglo-Saxon model of secularism and to the French model of secularism. I have a lot of problems with the way people measure religiosity, but if you look at the measurements, the United States is a pretty religious country by Western standards, as are Iraq and a lot of countries in the Middle East.
I think the one thing that really distinguishes the two cases is that the United States just has two political parties. Iraq has a lot of political parties, and Iraq has political parties that were once or still are Islamist parties, so they have a lot of religious ideology embedded into the party. You don’t really see that in the United States. You see advanced forms of religious parties in Europe, but not in the United States.
MM: As a country that has transitioned to democracy fairly recently, what do you think is the most important thing that people who are looking to build democracy in other countries can take away from Iraq?
MA: This is a bit of a counterintuitive one. As I look to see why Iraq managed to persist in its imperfect and extremely flawed experiment of democratization, but Tunisia, which had a lot more social capital, didn’t, I realize that there may be advantages to the oil curse that we never think of. By that, I mean oil has allowed Iraq to buy itself more time to figure out if it can push forward in democratization in a way that other countries can’t. Eventually, it’ll have to have a reckoning because oil isn’t going to be the solution to all of its problems. But I think the message I’d send with this isn’t a message about oil in particular but a message that there really isn’t one path or one model that’s successful or that will work. Oftentimes, things that you think might be obstacles are not the obstacles.
Democracy is a thing that tends to be strongly associated with the West, but we truly haven’t had a Middle Eastern version of democracy or understood how it works quite yet. I think we need to give it the space to do that. There are versions of democracy that aren’t Western that exist in other parts of the world like Latin America and East Asia. In Iraq’s case, I think a lot of people associated the failure of democracy with the failure of Western, American-style democracy, but there’s so much more space to reimagine what a Middle Eastern democracy will look like.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.