Iraq, a hard place: 20 years after the invasion

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See mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Traveling in India is fascinating, enlightening, worthwhile, but often pretty frustrating. That may soon change. The country is in the middle of a huge essential infrastructure upgrade that could make it richer and better connected. And all good things eventually come to an end. That includes my time hosting the Intelligence. At the end of the show, I'll say goodbye to Jason and our terrific colleagues and look ahead to my return on the other side of the microphone. But first, This week marks 20 years since the American invasion of Iraq.

So I got back from Baghdad earlier this month and I was really surprised to see more than ever a sense in which there are signs that life is returning to Iraq.

Nick Pelham is a Middle east correspondent for the economist.

There's a 37 story tower that's rising over the city for the new central bank. A new city ring road, the road to the airport that used to be considered to be the most dangerous road in the world because of the snipers and the bombs en route, is now lined with universities and new real estate. Even Western tour companies are talking about taking tourists back to look at the archaeological sites. That old fear that used to accompany anyone visiting and anyone living in the capital, Baghdad, has largely subsided. There hasn't been a suicide bombing there for over a year. The blast walls that used to dissect Baghdad have largely come down. Lots of people on the streets. Shops are buzzing. There's really a sense of the old Iraq is back. In fact, some Iraqis that I spoke to said they hadn't had it so good since the 1980s. Perhaps for the first time, there are the buds of recovery that are beginning to sprout in Iraq. Even the old warriors are now the people who want to be rebuilding the country instead of a jihad against Islamic State. They talk about waging a jihad to rebuild Iraq. They're looking for a purpose, but there's also a sense that actually the future is now with rebuilding and not with more devastation.

So you've described signs of stability, signals of economic recovery. How do people look back on the invasion of Iraq 20 years on?

I mean, just the price they've had to pay to get here has just been so immense, really horrific costs. Up to 300,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003, more than half of them civilians. Whole cities have been leveled. The old city of Mosul, one of the most beautiful classical Islamic cities in the Middle east, still lies in rubble. And the kind of physical and mental scars, you know, they've taken a massive toll. People had to live with car bombs and suicide bombers day in, day out for year after year. And there isn't a household in Iraq that isn't bearing the scars.

Is there a difference in how people look back on it depending on their age? I mean, there's an entire generation of young Iraqis who grew up post Saddam. Do they view things differently than their parents and grandparents?

They don't remember the old dictatorship. They see all the woes of the current age. The lack of solid governance, the sense in which the country is being carved out, militias who pose as political factions. They see endemic corruption, which is just eroding something like $1.3 trillion that the country has earned in oil revenue since 2003. They don't really feel that they're getting a government that is delivering. And their anger with the current system is intense. They don't see it as a democracy. They see it as a sham. And there's a real demand to have a strong man back, particularly amongst the young who don't remember the costs of dictatorship, to have somebody who can just get on and do the job and deliver and stop faffing about with jostling and infighting and divvying up of the spoils.

What is it like to be a citizen in Baghdad or in Iraq more broadly these days in terms of personal freedom and the threats of violence they face?

There's no doubt that the threat of jihadist, the threat of suicide bombing has come right down. The numbers of those who are killed in a month is probably equal to what it might have been in a few hours. The height of the violence. Whether it was in the days when Islamic state's caliphate was trying to take Baghdad, or in the middle of a civil war of the the mid 2000s, Iraq is not the same country that it was in 2003. Many of the minorities that used to be part of Iraq's composite picture have fled either to Kurdistan in the north or left the country altogether. Some of the oldest communities in Iraq barely exist, whether it's the Yazidis or the Chaldeans or some of these ancient Christian communities. But I think the reason why you have this sense of a degree of personal freedom is because the Shia militias feel they have won. They don't need to weaponize their faith in the way that they used to to a new law banning alcohol. Notwithstanding, they profit from bars and liquor stores with both taxes and the protection money they charge. Women can now walk unveiled through the streets without fear of militia harassment. But the Shia militias, they're still there. And you know, while you can criticise the Prime Minister, criticizing some of the militia commanders is a much more dangerous thing to do. People kind of whisper their names and some who do speak out and criticize the extortion rackets that they run pay for speaking out with their lives. And don't forget, demonstrators have been gunned down. Not so long ago, hundreds were killed in the process.

One of the big fears the west, especially the United States, had concerns the influence that Iran had over the Shia militias. How would you characterize the state of Iran's influence in Iraq today?

Yeah, I mean, when you speak to Iraqi officials, they themselves talk about 27 state finance militias, many of their commanders trained and studied in Iran. They profess their allegiance to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And with Iran's help, they've formed an overarching body, the Hashd Al Sha', Abi, or Popular Mobilization Committee, which in many ways is making Iraq in a similar way to the way that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the preeminent force in Iran has remade Iran. There's really a sense in which the Hashd Al Shaabi is now sort of emerging, I think, as the Iraqi counterpart to the irgc, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. With the same degree of political clout, the same degree of military clout, they claim to be able to outgun the official armed forces. And increasingly the same degree of economic clout. They're carving out more and more of the country for themselves. They're going to be the ones that are, you know, whether you like it or not, are going to be guiding Iraq into the future. And somehow you have to accommodate to that reality.

And Nick, your piece paints a grim, vivid picture of environmental conditions. Can you talk a bit about that, about the environmental challenges that Iraq faces as it rebuilds.

Yes. And I think that's kind of probably the primary illustration of just how self serving the system of government has been. While the politicians and the military factions enrich themselves, essentially, they've let Iraq go to the dogs. Much of the country is now a wasteland. You've got oil rigs that are still venting and spewing gas that they should be capturing into the atmosphere. You've got cities that are increasingly unlivable. I think you're going to see an increasing degree of internal migration, perhaps migration abroad as much of Iraq becomes unlivable. The, the enterprise marshlands of Iraq are drying up. Sewage is being spewed into the rivers. This is really a country which is asphyxiating itself as its own leaders thrive and pocket the proceeds of what should be an extraordinarily rich country.

It is rich. And you paint a vivid picture of a country on an economic climb, but one that's also moving away from democracy. What kind of Iraq do you think is emerging? What do you think the country will look like in five or 10 years?

I think there's a real question mark over to what extent democracy is going to survive in Iraq. Elections are still being held on time, but the results are largely cooked up. There isn't really a sense in which Iraqis are voting for their future. Fewer and fewer of them are voting. And I think that there is still a religious struggle that is taking place in the country. There are those who have power who are perhaps succumbing to the temptations of this world. But there are those who still want power and feel that religion can still be a strong mobilizing force, particularly in some of the poorer suburbs and these vast shanty towns that ring some of Iraq's major cities. I went to one Friday prayers which was absolutely heaving. It was in Suda City on the north eastern outskirts of Baghdad, all open air. And there must have been several hundred rows of worshipers, perhaps a hundred across and with a very powerful and political sermon telling their followers so there is still a degree to which there are large numbers of Iraqis who will follow perhaps blindly, the messages they're hearing from some of their religious leaders. At the same time, amongst a large swathe of Iraqis, there are many who have just feel that religion has become too politicized. They've paid too high a price for sectarianism for some of the bigotry and polemic that their religious leaders used to spout. Mosques that used to hold Friday prayers that spilled out onto roads. Now, I've struggled to fill their inner halls. Some of the main preachers, including the most followed of Iraq's religious leaders, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, no longer give Friday sermons because they don't feel they're being followed and listened to, particularly by the ruling elite. So I think there's a degree to which Iraq's future Is it going to be a sectarian state divided along Sunni and Shia lines, but also divided ethnically between Kurds and Arabs? Is it going to remain quartered by identity politics or can it finally come together? It's very telling that Sunnis and Shia for the first time, I think, in living memory, are celebrating the start of Ramadan on the same date. There is a sense in which the Muslim world in the Middle east is coming together. And the question is, is Iraq going to be part of that? Are Sunnis and Shia going to unite within one polity or are they going to continue to fight their own factional battles for territorial supremacy?

All right, Nick, thanks so much for your time today.

Thank you, John. Always a pleasure.

The unveiling of India's newest semi high speed rail service has been welcomed with enthusiasm by the public. The trains are electric, fast, quiet, roomy and comfortable, essentially the opposite of what India's rail service has been previously. And these new trains are part of a much bigger plan from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to get Indians moving.

I mean, it's really a spectacular train. It's only semi high speed, which means it goes at speeds of 130km an hour on average.

Leo Morani is an Asia correspondent for the Economist.

But you know, it's got these enormous windows, incredibly comfortable seats, it's very quiet. It's unlike any train I have taken in India before.

It sounds delightful. And tell us a bit about how it fits into India's broader infrastructure ambitions.

So India is undergoing an absolutely enormous infrastructure upgrade. I mean, pretty much everything you can think of, ports, airports, rail. And by rail, I mean both passenger and freight, metro lines in the cities and access control highways, to say nothing of upgrading the existing roads. But with this train in particular, the reason it's important and kind of symbolic is because Indian trains, they take a while to get anywhere. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. And the reason for that is there's a lot of trains sharing the same tracks, including goods trains. But these trains, they go fast, they're priority services, they're very comfortable, as I said. And the thing that Indians are particularly proud of is that they've been entirely designed and built indigenous by our own manufacturers and designers. Meanwhile, the government is also in the process of laying fresh tracks to separate out freight traffic. That should raise the average speeds of all trains on those routes. It should also raise the average speeds of goods trains, which currently have an average of about 25 kilometers an hour. And they'd be able to go as fast as 70km an hour.

So you mentioned that this is part of a huge infrastructure upgrade that India is getting as a whole. Can you quantify the size of it? How much is India spending on it?

Sure. India is spending 1.7% of GDP on road and rail alone. So that's twice the level in the US and in most European countries. It's significantly less, I should admit, than China, which spends around 6ish percent. But that's an enormous sum of money, second only to the Finance and Defense departments in terms of capital expenditure. It's spending 11% of all government capital spending on road and rail. That's up from 2.75% in 2014, which was the last budget presented by the previous government.

And can you give us a sense of the justification? Is this a vanity project for MODI or are these necessary infrastructure upgrades?

It's desperately needed. Takes forever to get anywhere and it really shouldn't. I mean, India is a very big country. Yes, but it's not that big. In the case of the roads, it's because they're heavily overburdened. The state highways, the national highways. Traffic has grown enormously as India has got richer and also as freight has moved from railways to roads. So the idea here is to upgrade all of the national highways and build new national highways as well as building access controlled expressways, the sort of thing where, you know, you can't get in on a two wheeler or whatever. They're also doing stuff in the airport. So when the Modi government took over, there were I think 74 airports operational in India. Today there's 138. Part of the reason is because they've converted Air Force facilities to also have civil aviation, but they've built a bunch of new airports as well.

So it's obviously going to make things more pleasant for travelers. Can you give us a sense of the economic impact of these infrastructure upgrades?

So today India is a $3.5 trillion economy. The Modi government wants to turn it into a $5 trillion economy as early as 2526. So the transport infrastructure is just one part of it. There's also been digital payments there's been a national ID system that was started 14 years ago now, but which is fully rolled out. The number of broadband connections has shot up by a factor of 10. So the idea is to make India richer in the same way that globalization worked. Globalization worked by allowing trade between countries. Here, the idea is to allow more trade within the country.

And of course, there's an election coming up next year. Do you think Modi reaps political benefits from this upgrade?

Absolutely. These roads, these trains, these airports, what they do is give people a sense that India is at last moving ahead. In a very sort of literal sense moving ahead. So the electoral benefits are undeniable. It is also undeniable that India needs to spend money on this stuff. But the fact is it is probably number two, if not number one on the list of what people think about when they think about what Narendra Modi's government has done to take India forward.

So he'll take credit for it. Do you think Modi deserves credit for it?

He does. He deserves quite a lot of credit for it. He and his government have made this their priority. He has empowered bureaucrats, given them more discretion. He has appointed very able lieutenants in the Roads Ministry and the Rail ministry. However, less popular to say is that he also inherited a platform. You know, he's standing on the shoulders of giants. So India's infrastructure push did not magically appear in 2014 when Mr. Modi became Prime Minister. India's infrastructure push started over 20 years ago when the earlier BJP Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee kicked off two very important projects. One was known as the Golden Quadrilateral, that was to upgrade or build high quality highways between India's four biggest cities. The other thing, which is far less well known, is he also kicked off a rural roads program which has had benefits as well. So after Atal Bihari Vajpayee came on, Mohan Singh, the Congress Prime Minister who ran the country for 10 years, he too introduced new programs, continued Vajpayee's work, and made his own contribution to easing bureaucratic processes and so on and so forth.

So it sounds like things have gone quite smoothly. Any roadblocks up ahead?

Well, you know, this is India. There are always roadblocks. Number one, and this is a roadblock to doing pretty much anything that involves construction in India, which is land acquisition. That's always a tricky thing. Unlike China, India is a democracy. People have rights. They can disagree with a government's decision and they can go to court. The courts take forever to decide anything. The lower Courts have some 42 million cases pending. The higher courts have some 6 million cases pending. There's all of that stuff. Okay. Then there's environmental clearances. That takes a while. There's also another sort of factor to consider here. It's not necessarily a roadblock, but it is concerning. One of the points of this whole exercise is to grow India's economy, to make ordinary Indians richer. And for that to happen, you also need private investment, and that we have not seen. Private investment has been tepid for the last 10 years or so, and that's something that really troubles this government. So there's a bunch of stuff that is standing in the way of the benefits being reaped. But nonetheless, I mean, that's bound to happen sooner or later. I am very optimistic about all of the stuff that's going on. I genuinely believe it's not simply an electoral. It is something India needs and it will have good benefits, but it may take longer than we all hope.

All right, Leo, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much for having me on to talk about this, John.

So, John, I know that we're here because you've got some news to share. I dread it. Go on, tell me.

Jason, it has been a privilege hosting the Intelligence with you for the past year. I mean that very deeply. It has been a privilege and a pleasure working with you. But this is my last day hosting the show.

Why would you do that to us? John?

Well, I'm taking on a split role that I'm really looking forward to. I will be writing about American business. I will be helping our digital team tell stories about business and finance online in interesting ways. And I'll be doing some audio reporting, so I'm not leaving completely and briefly.

How would you describe this past year working on the show? It's been something of a busy news agenda.

It's been a busy news agenda and it's been great. The best part of this job, the part that has really been a pleasure, is getting to talk to my colleagues, our correspondents, about what they've been working on in depth. I am always impressed by the caliber of people we are lucky enough to work with, but never more so than over the past year.

Any highlights along the way, favorite stories or favorite sort of recurring stories, news threads that have gone through your time on the show?

I'm a reporter at heart, and so my favorite thing about the past year was getting out on the road and reporting that midterm series. I also feel that I understand the war in Ukraine and the current financial crisis much better than I otherwise would have by virtue of talking to our correspondents who have been working diligently, and I mean really, really impressively diligently on both of those stories.

As you say, you're a writer, a reporter at heart. What have you learned along the way about doing that kind of storytelling?

But in audio, that's been, for me, one of the real pleasures of this job. It's a very different format, and I didn't appreciate how different it was until I actually started doing it. Audio stories are much more human than the sort of work we do in print. The analysis has to be embedded into a story of a person. You need a voice. You need something to hook the reader. And so that process, learning how reporting in print differs from reporting in audio, has been a real pleasure. I would also say that I've learned that the job of hosting is not that dissimilar to the job of reporting because, in essence, you are asking questions, you're listening to the answer. You're making a colleague feel at ease. You're getting the best out of that person. And so that process, that interview process has also been a pleasure. I love interviewing people as a journalist, and I have loved interviewing our colleagues as a host.

It's funny, you mentioned two things that I hold dear. That idea of being able to talk to any and all of our colleagues and kind of get privileged access to them, I suppose, for all the bits that don't make it into the show. But also a kind of, I don't know, wider understanding. I have to say, I didn't look, listen, think this widely before doing the show, and I feel pretty informed. I hope we're passing that on to the listeners.

I hope so, too. I feel much better informed. I hope our listeners do as well.

So it's clear what you've liked while you've been on the show, what we like about doing this. Go on, tell me what you absolutely hate.

Well, Jason, I'm not gonna pretend I've enjoyed the early morning hours. As you know, the bulk of our production staff is in London, which means the weeks that I'm hosting, I work on London time. So this morning, my alarm went off at 4:30. When news breaks, it's even earlier. I'm not gonna pretend to miss that.

Okay, one last task for you, John. One last time to take us out. Let's get the music up here. On you go, John.

All right, that's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin. And our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize Jean Baptiste, Kevin Kaynors and Sarah Larnyuk. And our assistant producer is Barkley Bram. With extra production help this week from Maggie Khedifa and Elna Schutz. They'll all see you back here on Monday. I'll talk to you later. Thank you for listening.