A bustling Baghdad market on June 14.
Photo: thaier al-sudani/ReutersIraq has had a turbulent 2020. The year began with the U.S. killing of Qassem Soleimani and a top Shia militia leader on Iraqi soil. Iraq’s Parliament responded with a nonbinding demand that 5,000 American military personnel exit the country promptly, which Washington rightly ignored. Iran also retaliated, with a missile barrage against U.S. bases in Iraq.
After months of limbo, Iraqis finally settled on a new prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi. He faces the daunting challenges of reducing corruption and improving employment prospects in a country rocked by demonstrations against the previous government, and now also by Covid-19. Throughout it all, Iraq remains in the unenviable position of being squeezed between the rock of proximity to Iran and the hard place of an unsettled yet important relationship with the U.S.
Yet something else of note is happening. Since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, there have been huge ups and downs. Recently, however, there have been modest signs of progress in the land of the two rivers. We have recently rebuilt the Brookings Iraq Index, after a hiatus of several years, and noticed some trends:
• The country’s population has grown from about 25 million in the last years of Saddam’s rule to 40 million today. That in itself is neither good nor bad, but it does mean that Iraq is big enough to be a significant player in Mideast politics.
• Per capita gross domestic product has increased to nearly $6,000 today from less than $4,000 two decades ago (in constant 2010 dollars). To be sure, there is still great poverty in Iraq, corruption abounds, and job prospects for young Iraqis are mediocre. Yet there have been positive economic developments.
• Oil production is up from about 2.5 million barrels a day in the latter Saddam years to about 4.5 million barrels now, and export revenues from oil have at least tripled, on average, since 2002.
• With the defeat of ISIS—an achievement that involved far more Iraqi than American forces—the annual rate at which Iraqis have been displaced internally has dropped by more than half since 2014-15.
• Numerous quality-of-life indicators have improved notably over the past two decades. Mobile telephones, once the exclusive preserve of the Baathist elite, are everywhere, with total users roughly equaling population. Internet users now total almost 10 million.
• Life expectancy is up from 67 in 2002 to about 73 today.
• Modern sanitation has climbed and now reaches more than 40% of the population, up from 32% before Saddam’s fall, and more than half the population has safe drinking water, too (though there is clearly much more to do on these fronts).
• The nationwide literacy rate is up from 74% at the turn of the century to 85% today.
• Electricity usage has more than tripled since 2002.
• Estimated civilian fatalities from political violence now total in the low thousands annually—still too high in a land that remains restless and unstable, but reduced 10-fold from the ugly years of the early to mid-2000s, to say nothing of the bloodiest times of Saddam’s rule.
To be sure, if Iraq is on a better path these days, it still has a long way to go to be stable politically and economically. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last year, and 75% of Iraqis who have told pollsters in recent years that their country was headed in the wrong direction. In indices on corruption and press freedom, Iraq consistently scores in the bottom quarter of all countries. But the country is gradually becoming more prosperous and, it appears, somewhat more stable.
Keeping things going in a better direction will be a huge challenge for Iraqi leaders. Washington should do what it can to help; polls suggest that Iraqis themselves, whatever their Parliament said earlier this year, want a partnership with the U.S., and fear too close a relationship with Iran.
The U.S. has devoted so much to Iraq since 2003—at least $1.5 trillion, more than 4,500 American lives and many times that number wounded, not to mention huge political effort in the Bush and Obama years. More-modest investments are appropriate today. If the issue comes up in the 2020 electoral campaign, American politicians should emphasize not only Iraq’s terrible past, both during and after Saddam’s rule, but its potential—and America’s capacity to help realize it.
Mr. Gollob is a student at Williams College and an intern at the Brookings Institution, where Mr. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow.
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