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Iraq

Iraq sits atop what could be the world’s second largest reserves of oil, but the country’s great economic potential has continually been thwarted by war—the latest one inaugurated by the US-led invasion in 2003.

At that time, Iraq had already endured a 35-year ordeal of war, sanctions and authoritarian rule. A year after Saddam Hussein assumed the presidency in 1979, Iraq invaded neighboring Iran. The ensuing eight-year war battered both countries, and in Iraq’s north, where the Kurds had long battled for autonomy from Baghdad, the Iraqi army’s genocidal Anfal operation killed well over 100,000 people.

In 1990, facing an enormous wartime debt, Hussein’s regime ordered the occupation of oil-rich Kuwait, leading the UN to impose comprehensive economic sanctions. The sanctions remained in place after the US-led coalition had expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait, while UN inspectors sought to verify that Iraq had destroyed its illicit chemical and biological weapons, until 2003. Sanctions, coupled with unaccountable regime spending, reversed Iraq’s substantial economic progress prior to the 1980s. UNICEF reported in 1999 that sanctions were partly responsible for the death of approximately 500,000 Iraqi children, primarily due to lack of clean water.

UN inspections had accounted for nearly the entirety of Iraq’s proscribed arsenal by 1998. The US and Britain maintained no-fly zones to protect the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, whose own rebellion had been bloodily suppressed in 1991. But the US, decrying a “mortal threat” from Iraq, moved to topple Hussein and his clique.

The Iraqi state collapsed with the regime. Neither the short-lived Coalition Provisional Authority nor the successor Iraqi governments, backed by the US military, have been able to restore key public services, political stability or basic law and order. Oil revenues are below pre-invasion levels. Outside of the three northern provinces, where the Kurds have established a de facto mini-state, the country is wracked by anti-occupation insurgency and severe civil strife. Many Iraqis view the new constitution as a recipe for partition.


Facts and Figures »