Iraq to its foundations: a chance to remake the state

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Wildfires are raging again in America's western states, a product of natural weather cycles on top of relentless climate change. The dearth of rain has been widespread enough and long lasting enough to call it a megadrought. And 175 years ago today, Britain repealed the tariffs known as the Corn Laws, the barriers to free trade and to prosperity that the Economist was founded to rail against. That victory still has lessons for today's free traders. But first, Ask Iraqis today about their voting intentions in October's elections and many will answer with another what's the point? They believe the government they elect will struggle to govern, that politicians are useless and corrupt, that the country is really run by militias, factions, tribal chiefs and foreign powers. Iraq has lurched from crisis to civil war and back again ever since its invasion in 2003. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq to free its people. By 2014, a third of its territory was controlled by the brutal extremist group Islamic State. The so called caliphate was crushed in 2017 and a measure of calm has since returned. That calm and an economy set to recover from the pandemic create an opportunity for the kinds of reform that voters are desperate to see.

So I went to Iraq because it's an important country and it's at an important juncture. They've got an election coming up in October.

Robert Guest is the Economist's foreign editor and has been speaking to some of those with the biggest say in the country's future.

The country has been devastated by dictatorship, genocide, invasion, civil war and Islamic State. And right now there's a feeling that with relative peace, there's a possibility of building a functioning state.

And what did you find out about how possible that really is?

We spoke to the Iraqi president, Baham Saleh. Can I ask about the election? What is at stake in the election? I think every thing is at stake, in my view. And he was very forthright.

This election will hopefully mean a new.

Parliament that will oversee major reform agendas.

And defining the character of the state.

Either the election will create an opportunity to build a functioning government, or he said the alternative is to fight it out in the streets, what he called the traditional Middle Eastern way. So, I mean, that's a sort of slightly jokey way of hitting on a very painful truth. You know, the alternative to the peaceful democratic process in Iraq is and has been violence. And so, you know, politics is a way of resolving disputes without killing each other. So it's very important to get it right.

And so what about the mechanics of the election itself? Is that part straightforward at least?

There's a huge task to ensure that the elections are free. It's not just that it's complicated with 13 main factions jostling for power, roughly seven Shia factions, four Sunni Arabs and two Kurdish ones. There's also the fact that some of these factions are armed. They have their own private militias, and they're not all playing by the rules. On top of that, a lot of people fret that no matter who wins, the shots will really be called by the militias, the tribes, corrupt factions, and indeed foreign powers.

You keep mentioning the prospect of building a state that works. In what way does Iraq not work?

Well, the starting point is the militias. There's a group of mostly Shia militias which were started to lead the fight against Islamic State when that took over a third of the country. They're not really loyal to the central government. They're loyal to their own leaders. Some of them are loyal to the Iranian government. They've managed to finagle their way into having a permanent claim on the public perth. They actually get paid by the government to the tune of about 2% of GDP. That's a sum that formal armies in most countries would envy. This is an extraordinary. I mean, while we were there, there was one militia boss who had been arrested on suspicion of having protesters killed. As soon as he was arrested, he got his men to threaten the prime minister and they released him. And so we found ourselves, just quite by chance, at one of the mosques in Karbala when he showed up to pay his respects there, having just been released, and there's a huge crowd sort of surging around him, welcoming his. But to a lot of Iraqis, this is terrible.

And you met with some of these militia bosses. What's their view?

We spoke to a militia boss called Sheikh Abdul Zahra Al Ghanim, who's the spiritual leader of the 10th Brigade of what's called the Hashd Al Shabi, the militias. And so initially he says, we always follow the prime minister's orders.

And the.

Hatchet is the essential. The pictures on the wall behind him are of Qassim Soleimani, who was the Iranian general who gave orders to many of the Shia militias, and Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. And then when you talk to some of the people with him, we spoke to someone called Abu Fatima Al Basri, who runs the Martyrs Centre where we met him. He really let the mask slip. He said, on earthly matters, we follow the prime Minister, but on religious matters we follow the ayatollah. And if their instructions were to conflic, he said, our faith is above the prime minister.

You mentioned the militias as the big problem. What other problems are there?

Well, the second big problem is that the government is run, by and large, for the benefit of government employees rather than the public as a whole. They are incredibly well paid. So everyone wants to work for the government. And you'll find that very often there'll be a militia or a faction that controls a ministry, and they will parcel out jobs to their supporters. Absolutely, regardless of whether that person has the ability or the inclination to do the job.

And so in terms of addressing those issues, what's actually on the ballot in this election? I mean, how can the Iraqi people go about securing reforms?

There's a danger at the election that a lot of people will either not vote or simply vote for their own tribe or their own religious group. It's a much better idea if people try to pick the candidate at the local level who is the least corrupt of those on the ballot. That is, I think, the best bet for coming up with a government that actually serves the people rather than robbing them. Meanwhile, a lot of ordinary Iraqis are just trying to get on with their lives. We met a guy called Gait al Hilo who gave a sense of perspective. He recalled taking a high school exam in Baghdad back in the turbulent days of 2007, when the country was virtually in civil war. And he remembers a gunfight broke out in the ground floor of the school and the teacher didn't stop the exam.

It was terrifying.

And at the same time, we have.

Experienced this kind of shooting fire already before this age, I think when I.

Was 16 or 15. Now, you know, you fast forward a bit more than a decade. And he says now he seldom hears any shooting in Baghdad, where he lives. And he's got enough confidence to try developing an online startup called Join the Club, which is to help Iraqis improve their English and their confidence speaking English in public. And so he's guardedly optimistic about the future.

I think we have a lot of things beside oil. We have a great heritage, great religion heritage, great culture. We have a good environment for agriculture.

But even so, he scorns the choice at the upcoming election and says, you know, he said, I'm going to spoil my ballot.

Thanks very much for joining us, Robert.

Thank you, Jason.

America is burning again.

It's getting closer.

One of the blazes raging across the country is the Telegraph fire, which has already forced many in Arizona to evacuate.

This thing is big and it's scary.

And it's murder moving quick. It's not far from town at all.

America experienced an extremely dry 2020 and a spring heat wave across the Southwest. The country's western states have entered their third consecutive decade of drought. Things have become so bad that Utah's governor recently invited his constituents to pray for rain. We need more rain, and we need it now. We need some divine intervention.

That's why I'm asking Utahns of all.

Faiths to join me in a weekend of prayer. Even America's largest reservoir, Lake Mead, is drying up.

Experts and locals are alarmed that this spring it has sunk to record low levels, underscoring the gravity of the extreme drought that has plagued the region. Things are looking pretty grim this year. Drought and wildfire are perennial characteristics of the American West. But in the past year, things have definitely worsened dramatically.

Erin Braun is the Economist's Mountain west correspondent.

Things are looking so bad that there are concerns that the region is experiencing a megadrought.

And what exactly is a megadrought?

The definition of microdrought varies, but the climatologists I spoke with broadly define it as a Multi decade period of severe aridity. And the defining feature is its length. So the current drought can be traced back to about 2,000. It's really more of an emerging megadrought. If you look at some of the other ones in the past 1200 years or so, some of them are 10 to 15 years longer. But that doesn't mean that the current drought isn't severe. A paper published in Science last year found that the period from 2000 to 2018 was the second driest 19 year stretch in the Southwest in the past 1200 years. And that is only exceeding a mega drought in the late 1500s.

So if these megadroughts have come about in the past, have been more severe in the past, it might suggest that what's happening now is potentially attributable to natural weather patterns rather than necessarily a changing climate.

In part, that's definitely true. It is normal for the American west to go through periods of drought. It is a hot, arid region with lots of mountains and deserts. Until very recently, we were seeing a La Nina weather pattern, and that is a natural climate pattern that occurs every so often. And that's when cooler surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean push the polar jet stream north. So northern states and southern Canada get cooler, wetter weather. And you normally get drought in the American Southwest. But in the past year, we've also seen really hot dry conditions in states like Oregon and Washington and Idaho that with a La Nina, you would expect not to see drought. I think one of the most striking things about the current drought is really its geographic spread. The drought in the 1500s was mostly concentrated in the Four Corners region, and that is where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah meet. And today's drought encompasses most of the area west of the Continental Divide. And that divide mostly runs along the Rocky mountains. As of June 17, 98% of the west was at least abnormally dry, and 55% was in either extreme or extreme exceptional drought.

But that's not to say that climate change is off the hook altogether.

I guess Climate change is playing a huge role in the current drought. The water that fills the country's biggest reservoirs, like Lake Mead, for example, on the border of Nevada and Arizona, comes from melting snowpack that had accumulated over the winter. But average snowpack across the region has been decreasing for decades as rising carbon dioxide emissions have led to warmer winters. So a climatologist I spoke with found that the west had seen record melt rates in the first two weeks of April. Snowpack in California in the Sierras was at 0% of average, as of June 1, that means it had melted about four to five weeks ahead of time, which is really, really concerning. Questions about water scarcity have long been central to the West. And despite climate change making these lands less inhabitable, the region is growing so quickly, eight of the ten fastest growing states in the country in the last decade are west of the Mississippi River. So the water supply is shrinking, but the amount of people is only growing.

And so what effects is that having? What is this emergent megadrought doing to the West?

The effects of drought are really wide ranging. If we just look at the environmental impacts alone. Less snowpack can lead to lower stream flows and increased river temperatures, and that affects the entire ecosystem. Fish may die out or have trouble living in rivers they've lived in their whole lives. This can also deprive forests and soils of nutrients. So part of the reason why the reservoirs are so low is because the soils were so thirsty that they sucked up a lot of the melting snowpack before it could even get to the river to get to the reservoir. Drought also heightens the risk and severity of wildfires. So we saw a record fire season in states like California and Colorado last year. Officials have already been warning for a month or so that this fire season could be extremely long and very severe.

And this is very much in line with the kinds of warnings that we've been hearing for some years about climate change in a more general sense, the droughts and water scarcity and water insecurity and so on.

Yeah, this is definitely not a problem, only plaguing the American west by any means. We're seeing drought and desertification across the globe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that about 178 million people will be vulnerable to water loss or drought or some kind of habitat degradation by 2050. And those numbers depend on global temperatures only rising by 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels. And if it rises anymore, we'll only see those numbers go up. And whereas the American west may have the resources to invest in climate resilience and perhaps provide subsidies to folks like farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods depend on land and on water, poorer countries don't have that luxury. So you see lots of countries in Asia and Africa that are really at risk. So a thirsty planet will certainly cause millions more to suffer.

Aaron, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

When the Economist was founded in 1843, it wasn't only to keep readers informed, but also to take part in what it called a severe Contest between intelligence and an unworthy, timid ignorance. At the time, that wasn't just a theoretical argument. Britain was debating the Corn Laws tariffs on imported grain. The Economist was founded to fiercely, fundamentally oppose them and to champion free trade. And it worked. 175 years ago today, the House of Lords repealed the Corn Laws. And the lessons of that first severe contest continue to resonate.

The Corn Laws were the most important thing that most Britons had to deal with in the early 19th century.

Kenneth Cukier is a senior editor at the Economist and hosts Babbage, our sister show on science and technology.

The tariffs could be as high as 80%, but more commonly were around 10 to 20%. In the 1830s and 1840s, almost half of most British people's income was spent on food alone.

And given that, why were those tariffs, the Corn Laws, imposed in the first place?

The Corn Laws were a sop to the landed gentry at a time when it was the landowners who served in Parliament and people who were non landowners in Britain could neither serve in Parliament nor even vote. It was a long and exhausting fight to get them repealed. But the takeaways are still relevant to the trade talks that we are faced with today.

And so how did that come to pass? How were the Corn Laws repealed?

Well, there's a lot of little lessons that we can decrypt from how the Corn Laws were eventually repealed. The first thing was that it required a campaign that was with a broad coalition of people that creatively used the media. The coalition entailed the working class as well as moral minded aristocrats, and finally, and most importantly, wealthy manufacturers that wanted to unleash the power of the economy.

And once that coalition was formed, how did they create a campaign?

They got together and created something called the Anti Corn Law League. And that was, if you will, one of the first lobbying groups that ever existed. An interesting dimension to this was their use of creating media to make the case in the public sphere to abolish tariffs. And there not only were books and pamphlets created, but they also supported the creation of a new newspaper called the Economist in 1843. In the first issue it ran an article that's just beautiful, with that Victorian eloquence decrying quote unquote, that narrow and ignorant legislation which seeks falsely and in vain to prop up and protect individual interests. We must rely alone on the great principles of public good for public prosperity.

So how did that vociferous campaign then translate into actual policy?

So the Prime Minister at the time was named Robert Peel. And he was actually against repealing the Corn Laws. The Conservative policy, in fact, was to favor the Corn Laws in part because of wanting to preserve domestic production of food. However, he recognized, recognized the problem of the potential for famine that was taking place in Ireland to sweep into Britain. And so as a result, he felt that the best thing to do would be to remove these tariffs. But he did so in a gradual way. They didn't finally get completely abolished until three years later, after the repeal was enacted. And that gave time for landowners to adapt. Now, at the same time, by doing so, by this unilateral move by Britain, it inspired other countries to also lower their tariffs as well as. And a reason for that is because there was tangible, visible benefits to people's everyday lives. By one study, by 1850, people paid around a quarter less for bread than they had had repeal not occurred. Free trade was a helping hand to the poor against the rich. It was a progressive policy and it was politically popular.

And you say the way this went down is useful for today's talks around trade?

Absolutely. The case for free trade today is made by policy wonks and dull talking heads as well as rapacious executive. But it's not the broad, energetic coalition of the past. At the same time, the opponents of globalization have completely nailed media and social media in particular, while the people who are the supporters of it are largely absent. Finally, politicians today want grand gestures, but are unwilling to do the quiet incrementalism of Robert Peel. And at the same time, the benefits of free trade are largely hidden from consumers.

So with those benefits hidden, it becomes kind of a political football, then.

Free trade has typically been a way to support ordinary people against special interests from the wealthy. It's just today, in this weird political and economic climate, that the whole purpose of free trade seems to be distorted into helping companies. But it never was that, and it actually does serve a huge interest. And there's 500 million people in China who've been lifted out of poverty in the last three decades because of it. We need to make that case, even if it's an unpopular one, because I'm sure that the economic logic of it will win out in the end.

Ken, thank you very much for joining us.

Jason, it's always a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Kim Gitelson and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans, with help this week from Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Duncan Barber and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren. And assistant producer Ebisoye Oshundairo. With extra production help this week from Jolene Goffin, Alize, Jean Baptiste, Pete Naughton and Elna Schutz. We'll all see you back here on Monday.