Alissa Walter in Contested City, Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad provides another important piece of modern scholarship on Iraq. Through interviews and government documents she was able to analyze how Iraqis interacted with the state in Baghdad from the Baathist to U.S. occupation periods. She found that the government created a system of patronage and clientism which the Americans failed to grasp when they took over the country leading another mistake in the occupation.
The two main sections of the book compare and contrast how the Baathists governed Baghdad versus how the Americans failed after 2003.
The Baath Party set up offices in each one of Baghdad’s neighborhoods. These served two main purposes to hear the concerns and complaints of the public and to surveil them. Iraqis came to petition these offices with all kinds of issues especially from the 1980s to 2003 when the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions hit. Rather than being a top down, totalitarian society as many used to portray Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Walter found that the local offices had lots of leeway to respond to their communities and Saddam encouraged them to do so. The book contains many examples of people writing either to the neighborhood office or Saddam himself asking for their food rations to be restored or to complain that they were being blamed for their son being an army deserter and being evicted from their home as a result. Local Baath officials were often able to respond to these letters on their own without consulting with higher officials showing agency by both the population and party members.
This compares to the pos-2003 period where the book found the Americans attempting to impose their ideas unsuccessfully upon Baghdad allowing Moqtada al-Sadr to move in. The U.S. set up local councils in each major Baghdad neighborhood to hear the from the public and pass on their messages to the Coalition Provisional Authority. The councils were given no power, no budget and weren’t even paid at first. Iraqis believed they would operate just like the Baathist ones they replaced but were disappointed by their lack of authority. The Americans were not only ignorant of what the Baathist offices did but opposed to having their new councils help individuals. This allowed Sadr to move in with his Sadr Bureau which took on many of the duties that the Baath Party did providing services, jobs and protection. This helped solidify Sadr’s control of Shiite neighborhoods and ones that his militia took over during the civil war period. Sadr would neglect the bureau later as he focused upon national politics but it showed that he was aware of the power and potential of local councils while the U.S. was not. This was just one example of how the U.S. came to occupy Iraq without a single clue about how the country was run or how society operated and paid the price for it.
Walter provides a very readable account of how Baghdad developed as a city and a bureaucratic entity up to the present time. The Baath decentralized some of its power to local offices to try to maintain public support and control them at the same time. The U.S. came in thinking it had to break the power of a centralized totalitarian state and created ineffective local councils that only made Iraqis angry at the occupation because they weren’t as responsive as the Baathist ones they replaced. Sadr was able to exploit this mistake and assert control over many neighborhoods in the city. The story is highly ironic because the Americans in practice were much more interested in concentrating power in their hands rather than spreading it out like Saddam had done. It also shows how Iraqis had much more autonomy under Baath rule than previously believed. This is part of the new research into Iraq which is breaking down my stereotypes people had about the country.
Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic
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