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Effects of corrosive corruption in Iraq Jamal Doumani | Published — Saturday 14 May 2016 Corruption is no walk in the park. Its corrosive effects on society can be debilitating, it being an insidious force that both immobilizes economic development and enfeebles social capital. There’s nothing new in that assessment. Experts have pointed to it as a cause, in some instances the primary cause, of the inexorable transition of a political body from a promising, emergent state to a “failed state,” that is, a state that has disintegrated to a point where the basic responsibilities of a sovereign government no longer function properly, or where legitimate authority has so eroded that that sovereign government can no longer make collective decisions. In short, to paraphrase Lord Acton’s well-known observation on power, corruption enfeebles, and absolute corruption enfeebles absolutely. Earlier this week, in the context of an anti-corruption summit being held in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron, at an event held at Buckingham Palace marking Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday, was caught on camera making unguarded remarks about corruption, where he identified Nigeria and Afghanistan as being possibly “the two most corrupt countries in the world.” Were these two countries indeed corrupt, or the most corrupt, is not the issue. Trust me on this one: There are a lot of contenders around the globe vying for that not-so exultant title. But let’s in this regard look at Iraq, a country that has been in political crisis for, well, thirteen years, where on April 30 demonstrators stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone, a government stronghold off limits to ordinary Iraqis, and occupied the Parliament, demanding, as reported in the New York Times, “an end to sectarian quotas in politics, improved governance and a fight against corruption.” Yes, indeed, corruption, according to Global Corruption Barometer and Transparency International, Iraq, sadly, has plenty of that, pervasive corruption at all levels of the government, including the bureaucracy, the police, the judiciary and the party elite. In other words, the Land Between the Two Rivers remains a divided nation steeped in corruption, a nation where, despite billions upon billions of dollars spent to “rebuild” it — reportedly $140 billion in Iraqi money and earlier $60 billion in American money, in those days airlifted in pallets of $100 bills — life for most ordinary Iraqis has not improved. All that money, according to a report released last year by the Special US Inspector General for Iraq, Stewart Bowen, “under-performed.” The level of fraud, waste, abuse, kickbacks, bribery, nepotism and rest of it detailed in the report was appalling, including the emergence in recent years of an elite that pillaged, with impunity and with no fear of retribution, massive amounts of public funds — clearly with disastrous consequences for Iraq and its people. In an article last year in the London Guardian, for example, we read of an interview by the paper’s correspondent in Baghdad with Misham Al-Jabouri, “one of Iraq’s top anti-corruption leaders.” And while reading it one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, as Jabouri reflects frankly on fighting corruption in his country. “Everybody is corrupt, from the top of society to the bottom. Everyone. Including me,” he averred. “I was offered $5 million by someone to stop investigating him. I took it.” Then he added, as an afterthought, “But I continued prosecuting him anyway.” “Believe me,” continued the earnest anti-corruption crusader, “most of the senior names in the country have been responsible for stealing nearly all its wealth. There are names at the top of the tree who would kill me if I went after them. When people here steal, they steal openly. They brag about it. There is a virus here, like Ebola.” A virus called corruption, an endemic disease, a social affliction, a crippling handicap. And the more brazen it is, the less effective is governance. It seems everybody in Iraq, from ordinary citizens who protest it by storming their Parliament, to government officials who bemoan its ubiquity in interviews with foreign reporters, abhors corruption. Yet no one, it appears, has done anything to check it. The corrosive effects of corruption go beyond mere theft of public funds. In a trickle-down effect, over time, it could have negative consequences on the nature of a nation’s political culture, its sustainable economic development, on people’s trust in the actors and institutions of government, even on the constitution of personality of individual citizens, who in time are socialized to believe that it is normal for office holders to have their hands out, that is, act in their official capacity for political gain. Look, corruption (a term first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and later formalized by the Roman political theorist Cicero) is a persistent feature of human communities, but high levels of corruption can be deadly for a state, breaking down the social contract between ruler and ruled, checks and balances and the notion of accountability by one’s public servants. When that happens, everything else breaks down as well. And the state becomes a ghost of its idealized self — a failed state. Ordinary Iraqis deserve better.
