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Muck around with the belief of citizens in a democracy that their governments are actually democratic, and youre asking for trouble.

Emmanuel Macron and Bibi Netanyahu are only beginning to find this out.

French President Macrons decision last Thursday to raise his nations retirement age from 62 to 64 by presidential diktat, once he realized that the National Assembly wasnt going to enact it for him, will surely multiply the millions of Frenchmen and women whod already taken to the streets, by a factor of well, a lot. That conservatives in the National Assembly whod previously supported raising the age had backed off their earlier support was partly due to polling that showed the public opposed the measure by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Another recent poll had shown that two-thirds of French people believed that French democracy wasnt working very well.

That was before Macrons thunderbolt. A quick poll that Harris Interactive conducted last Thursday, hours after Macrons action, found that 82 percent disapproved of the use of constitutional provision 49.3which enables laws to be made without having to pass the legislatureto raise the retirement age, while 65 percent favored continuing the protests in the street.

More from Harold Meyerson

Clause 49.3 requires some explanation. As France-ologist Art Goldhammer explained to me on Thursday, the clause has been invoked 89 times, by governments of the right, center, and left, since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The vast majority of the previous invocations, however, have been on matters like budgetary appropriations; none of them, until last Thursday, had been used to alter anything so fundamental as the nations social contract.

In 1958, clause 49.3 was very much the creation of the man behind (and in front of) the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. The problems with the Fourth Republic, which had governed France since the end of World War II, centered on the frequent falling apart of its governments, which were cobbled together as coalitions of the nations many political parties. The revolving door of governments meant, among other things, that there was no steady national policy on the fraught process of decolonialization, on which the nation had been compelled to embark. To stop the rapid-fire succession of governments and policies, the Fifth Republics constitution created a presidency with five-year terms, regardless of the formations and dissolutions of legislative majorities, and put control of foreign policy in the presidents hands. And just in case the legislature was too obdurate or obstreperous, Article 49.3 also gave the president a way around the legislature in domestic matters as well.

Needless to say, the Fifth Republics first president was the selfsame Charles de Gaulle.

Before last Thursday, this imbalance of power between the branches of government had never really deeply affected the fundamentals of French life, which is why most political parties had not sought to change it. In recent years, one leader of the French left, Jean-Luc Mlenchon, has called for a new constitution that doesnt enthrone the president with such Gaullist (or, if you prefer, Bourbon-esque) levels of power, but his and his partys position has been a niche concern. That niche could stand to grow larger. More French politicians, and certainly the public, may now look at their constitutional arrangements and ask, in the mighty words of R. Crumbs Mr. Natural: Is dis a system?

A poll conducted last Thursday, hours after Macrons action, found that 82 percent disapproved of the use of constitutional provision 49.3 to raise the retirement age.

At least since 1789, of course, France has also had a separate, extra-constitutional branch of government: the streets. In 1995, so many Frenchmen and women took to the streets that the conservative government of President Jacques Chirac, which had gotten parliament to vote to raise the retirement age, was compelled to announce that it wouldnt promulgate that legislation into law.

In the past few months, the French have taken to the streets again in very large numbers to oppose raising the age, but I suspect that may be a trickle compared to whats about to come. After last Thursday, le dluge.

THE FRENCH ARENT THE ONLY PEOPLE protesting the withdrawal of democratic rights. In Israel, the issue is also that of a sudden alteration of long-established de facto guaranteesin this case, the existence of an independent judiciary.

Those guarantees are de facto rather than de jure because Israel (like the U.K., which had governed Palestine before Israeli independence) has no written constitution. But just as the French had assumed that truly major social legislation would not become law through presidential fiata de jure guaranteea clear majority of Israelis had assumed that even without a constitution, the independence of the judiciary was assured. Indeed, an independent judiciary in Israel is all the more important, since the nation has no constitutional equivalent of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and its solely up to the courts to defend the civil liberties of the minority.

As in France, so in Israel: Polling there has shown that two-thirds of Israelis are opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus governments move to subject the courts to parliamentary override. But like Macron, Bibi and his far-right coalition continue to move ahead to subject Israel to unchallenged rule by anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab extremists, and anti-all-Jews-save-the-ultra-Orthodox extremists as well. Only the courts, and the streets, stand in their way.

And in recent weeks, the streets have been filled with what now total millions of Israelis, calling on the government to stop. Augmenting the masses in the street is another form of social protest. Key sectors of Israels secular Jewish majorityabove all, in the tech industry and the militaryhave threatened to emigrate or stand down, respectively, if the government effectively eliminates the courts.

In Tel Aviv as in Paris, democracy is in the streets. There are differences, to be sure. Israelis are demanding the preservation of the branch of government that defends minority rights, while the French are demanding that the nation not be governed by a president who can ignore a parliamentary majority. But both sets of demonstrators know they represent clear majorities of their respective populations.

There are some unhappy similarities as well. The left-wing parties in both countries have been so fragmented and feckless that they couldnt forestall their nations current crises. In France, the failure of the left to unite and back policies that defended the working class against neoliberalisms ravages has meant that the nationalist far right now eclipses the left, in parliament and at the polls. In Israel, the failure of left parties to unite both with themselves and with the Israeli Arab parties enabled the right to win the last election, and a number of elections before that one.

That representatives of the left in these countries are now in the streets, then, is partly their own damn fault.

AND WHAT ABOUT HERE, in the US of A?

We, too, have seen one huge withdrawal of legal rights and concomitant disruption of the social order recently, in our own Supreme Courts revocation of Roe v. Wade. That also was met by demonstrations, however brief, and then electoral affirmations of the right to choose in a host of states, both blue and red.

Those demonstrations may seem as nothing compared to the outbursts to come should a Trump-appointed, far-right federal district judge in Amarillo, Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, a nonsurgical way to end a pregnancy that was authorized decades ago by the FDA. As in Israel and France, the protests will be directed at the policy itself, at the withdrawal of a long-standing social right, and at a governance structure that allows for the arbitrary overruling of that right.

Our nations governing structure, of course, is fairly larded with features and foundations that effectively counter democratic values, beginning with the Electoral College and the Senate. Like the French, we, too, have a proud tradition of taking to the streets, in actions that have produced civil rights laws and occasional alterations to foreign and military policies. In the early and mid-1930s, some strikes were so disruptive that they compelled the government to enact worker rights legislation.

But ours is an immense and diverse country, which has never seen quite the equivalent of what lies ahead for France, and what Israel is now beginning to experience. Judge Kacsmaryk may well just change all that, but given all the impediments to our nations achieving the status of a genuine democracy, we may yet need to fill both the streets and the voting booths for decades to come.

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Democracy Is in the Streets - The American Prospect

NEW ORLEANS (press release) Since becoming a state in 1812, Louisiana has participated in Americas bold experiment with democracy. In anticipation ofAmerican Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith, a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution coming to THNOC in mid-June, the 2023 History Symposium explores how the democratic system has functioned in Louisiana and how key events have influenced our current political environment. Moderator Dr. Pearson Cross and a vibrant slate of speakers will address topics ranging from the drafting of the first constitution and the politics of enslavement to the womens suffrage movement in New Orleans and how Louisianas environment impacts public policy. The symposium also complementsYet She Is Advancing: New Orleans Women and the Right to Vote, 18781970, a companion exhibition toAmerican Democracyopening at THNOC on April 28.

WHAT: History Symposium: Democracy in Louisiana

WHERE: Hotel Monteleone

WHEN: Saturday, April 1, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Champagne reception to follow from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

WHO:Hosted by The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC)

Speakers include Dr. Pearson Cross (moderator), Dr. Brian Klopotek, John Barbry, Dr. Steven Procopio, Dr. Laura Rosanne Adderley, Dr. Theodore R. Foster III, Dr. Libbie Neidenbach, Dr. Albert L. Samuels, Rebecca Mowbray, Lamar Gardere and Dr. Andy Horowitz

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Democracy in Louisiana, a History Symposium presented by The ... - New Orleans Magazine

Your people cant take it anymore, LordIn exchange for oil and gas they sell our country.

These lines, translated from Portuguese, are from the song Vendem o Pais, They Sell the Country, by the late, great Mozambican hip hop artist Azagaia. Born Edson da Luz, he died on March 9th at the age of 38. He was a movement artist, empowering millions with songs challenging the elite and inspiring grassroots action. A frequent theme in his lyrics is the exploitation of Mozambique by extractive industries like oil and gas. Thousands poured into the streets on the news of his death, to honor his life and to protest the power structures he so consistently and eloquently criticized. The Mozambican government responded with a brutal crackdown, unleashing tear gas, rubber bullets, and beating and arresting protesters.

Azagaias death coincided with two events that reinforce central themes of his music. First, Cyclone Freddy, a world-record-breaking extreme storm, slammed Southern Africa not once but twice, wreaking devastation, killing over 500 people in Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar and displacing over one million people. And second, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released its Sixth Synthesis Report, summarizing almost a decade of global scientific research on climate change and issuing its direst warnings yet on the urgency of immediate, concerted global climate action.

Cyclone Freddy was the longest-lived and highest-energy tropical cyclone in recorded history. The storm was named on February 6th, as it developed off the northwest coast of Australia. Freddy headed west over the Pacific Ocean, building force from the historically high ocean surface temperatures, slamming into the island nation of Madagascar on February 21st. After then spending five days inundating Mozambique, Freddy retreated to the waters offshore, again building strength. As police were suppressing the Azagaia protests, Freddy arrived again, pummeling Mozambique and southern Malawi for four days before dissipating. The World Food Program and other aid agencies are scrambling to reach people cut off by the torrential rain, flooding and mudslides.

Cyclone Freddy serves as a stark illustration of the warnings included in the new IPCC report. The rate of temperature rise in the last half-century is the highest in 2,000 years, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said as the report was released. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years. The climate time bomb is ticking. The science is unequivocal: humans are causing a climate catastrophe, and our window to avoid irreversible damage is closing rapidly. Most importantly, people in poor nations, in the Global South, bear the brunt of climate disasters, but have contributed the least to global carbon emissions. This is the ongoing legacy of colonialism and resource extraction embedded in the lyrics of Azagaia.

So many people within our countries, especially in Africa, are invisible, evoking pity when a deadly cyclone hits, forgotten the week after, Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, wrote in a piece eulogizing Azagaia. As the crises deepen, people are going to get more and more incensed, she said on the Democracy Now! news hour. The youth are going to get more and more incensed. We need cultural icons like Azagaia. We need space. We need constructive ways for people to get involved, to be able to organize, to oppose the injustices that are happening. And the powerful know that.

A new front to challenge entrenched power is being opened in the United States. Founded by author and climate activist Bill McKibben, Third Act seeks to inspire people 60 years and older to take action against climate change.

Third Act recognizes that young people have been providing the climate leadership, young people and people from frontline communities, Indigenous communities, McKibben said on Democracy Now! What they lack sometimes is the structural power to force change at the pace that we need. Older people have structural powerThere are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. That is a sleeping giant.

This week, Third Act launched a National Day of Action to Stop Dirty Banks. Protests were held in at least 30 states, at major banks like Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America demanding they stop funding fossil fuel projects. Here in D.C., for instance, the banks are going to be blockaded with people in rocking chairs, McKibben explained. Older people are sitting down today, but theyre also standing up in a way that they havent before.

This latest IPCC report, Secretary General Guterres says, is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity. For a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels, it will take grassroots organizing and action. As Azagaia often declared, POVO NO PODER! (Put the People in Power!)

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The Climate Bomb is Ticking, from Mozambique to Wall Street - Democracy Now!

POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock

Earlier this month, conservative law students gathered in Austin, Texas, for the Federalist Societys first National Student Symposium since the overturning of Roe. This years theme was law and democracy but the relationship between those two principles seemed more than a little unclear.

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposiums focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental, writes Ian Ward, one of the few men in attendance who did not wear a suit and tie. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed judicial restraint, the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures.

That was all well and good when conservatives saw the judiciary as the domain of activist liberals, dragging the nations laws further leftward than the legislative branch had intended. But with a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a majority of the nation out of step with conservative positions on issues like abortion, that approach has come under scrutiny particularly among younger conservatives, who bear no scars from the legal losses of decades past.

As Federalist Society members consider where the movement goes from here, there was a definite sense of cognitive dissonance at the conference, where many of the panelists appeared willing to endorse the logic of anti-democratic arguments but shied away from those arguments more radical conclusions, Ward writes. For some, that means embracing a more interpretative approach to jurisprudence that the society has long opposed. As Federalist Society president and CEO Eugene Meyer put it: I think it would be fair to say theres been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint.Law professor Josh Blackman was more forthright: The norm that judges be restrained and moderate that ship has sailed.

Read the story.

Youre tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.

Can you guess who wrote this about Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

The former vice presidents appearance at Washingtons venerable Gridiron Dinner earned a rapturous response. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

Mike Pence and a Bunch of Nerds Walk Into a Bar OK, they actually walked into the Gridiron Dinner, where the former vice president set off a much-talked-about homophobia controversy. But theres another element of his appearance worth scrutinizing, writes Michael Schaffer in this weeks Capital City column: His pointed criticism of Donald Trump came at the same time that hes resisting a subpoena that could help hold Trump accountable. And worst of all, a Washington desperate to look bipartisan in an age of stark division abandoned self-respect and ate it right up.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank spooked markets. But dont be afraid of sounding like an idiot the next time youre dishing over kombucha in Palo Alto just follow these talking points (from POLITICOs Sam Sutton):

- If anyone asks when you heard about the bank run, just say that youre glad you unmuted WhatsApp notifications.

- No, I did not submit a bid to the FDIC for Silicon Valley Banks assets this weekend. Why would I waste my time on an offer sheet that cant fully guarantee more $150 billion of uninsured deposits?

- Where were the regulators? I mean, sure. But also, where the hell was the risk manager? Nobody in C-suite watches Powell pressers?

- When someone says that SVB could bring down the global economy, ask them why the European Central Bank raised rates by half a percentage point on Thursday.

Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), who died this week at 82, at a National Organization for Women convention in July 1987. | Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Remembering a Feminist Icon Former U.S. Rep. for Colorado Pat Schroeder, the feminist pioneer who drew attention to her cause with her brand of witty straight-talk remember her saying Ronald Reagan had a Teflon-coated presidency, or that dynastic figures like George W. Bush were members of the lucky sperm club? died this week at age 82. In this retrospective on her 12 terms in Congress, Joanna Weiss explores Schroeders landmark contributions to women and American politics, like the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 as well as the work still left to be done.

The headlines this week have assured readers that a financial meltdown is not imminent while raising the alarming possibility that the opposite might be true. While wondering which headlines, exactly to trust, it is instructive to go back to the biggest meltdown of them all the Great Crash of 1929 and see how the papers handled it. Fortunately, we have this prime example for sale for $48 on eBay, a Chicago Tribune from Wednesday, October 23, 1929, which reassuringly told readers, Stock Market Will Recover, Doctors Think. It sounded great at the time. The very next day, October 24, would become known as Black Thursday, which saw the largest sell-off of shares in history and helped launch the Great Depression.

**Who Dissed answer: President Barack Obama got caught saying this on a hot mic at the G-20 Summit, along with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who said of Netanyahu, I cant stand him. Hes a liar.

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Are young conservatives giving up on democracy? - POLITICO

Twenty years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq under the code name Operation Iraqi Freedom, setting in motion a disastrous war that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over four thousand Americans, and triggered a new era of instability in the Middle East.

Every time an anniversary for that catastrophic war passes, American commentators and former government officials who supported it engage in a nauseating ritual of trying to escape accountability. They downplay what was foreseeable, obscure the lies that served as pretexts for the war and critique the invasion primarily through a strategic lens rather than a moral or an ideological one.

These revisionist narratives typically get some pushback. But its not enough to re-examine what Americans got wrong. A true reckoning requires examining what happened to Iraqis. And while many are broadly familiar with the huge number of Iraqi casualties, few in the West have paid attention to how the war reshaped Iraqi politics and society. What did the U.S.-sponsored democracy-building project actually produce in a country that Freedom House ranks today as definitively not free, despite its nominal status as a democracy?

To get an analysis of the war's political effects on Iraq, I called up Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow and the project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, and a co-author of Once Upon a Time in Iraq. Mansour, who is currently on one of his regular visits to Iraq, discussed the contradictions of the U.S.'s political goals in nation-building, how elite exiles worked with the U.S. to reshape the Iraqi political system to suit their own interests, and the dark prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Zeeshan Aleem: Whats your assessment of why the Iraq War was waged?

Renad Mansour: I think it became very clear in the early days of the George W. Bush administration that Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his regime were a problem in their view. And so after 9/11, there were attempts made to link Hussein to Al Qaeda, to include Iraq in the new war on terror. Then there was another argument made shortly after, which was that Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction. And then you had this idea, driven by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, that democratizing Iraq would serve U.S. interests and would somehow lead to more democracies and fewer anti-American regimes in the Middle East. That was the kind of at least the thread that they were trying to weave.

There was this idea that they could do it. That even with flimsy intelligence, with uncertainty whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even with very flimsy connections, if any, to Al Qaeda and the war on terror, it didnt matter, because Iraqis would welcome the Americans and the Brits with open arms and therefore democracy would have made it worth it in any case.

It was a political project. It was very clear that Saddam had turned into enemy No. 1 since the Gulf War when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. And throughout the decades, the U.S., even under the Clinton administration, had continued to work with different Iraqi opposition forces outside of Iraq trying to force regime change. 2003 was the opportunity, and so they had to find a way to sell it to their people.

How serious was the democracy-building project?

Mansour: When WMDs werent discovered, it became important for the U.S. and the U.K. and their allies to prove that Iraq was becoming a democracy quickly. There was this rush: We need a constitution; lets just have an election ASAP. But critically, what was missing, and the contradiction in all of this, was they didnt actually speak to most Iraqis.

They drafted the constitution, created a political system and set up elections without actually engaging with the people of the country.

The Coalition Provisional Authority would be formed soon after the invasion, which became the occupying power, led by Paul Bremer, who had no experience in Iraq. And they became the sovereigns, working exclusively with returning exiles who themselves had not been in Iraq for decades. They drafted the constitution, created a political system and set up elections without actually engaging with the people of the country. It became symbolic, because they built a green zone, where they hid, and Baghdad and the rest of the country became known as the red zone you dont go there, its too dangerous, its too risky.

What ended up happening was elite exiles who were coming back empowered themselves. They built a political system that would serve their interests, not the interests of the people. So thats the contradiction of Iraqs democracy you have. There are the trappings of democracy,but in reality youre not close to democracy.

Who were those exiles, and what were their interests?

Mansour: The exiles were specific political parties. There were two primary Kurdish parties, who had fought a long insurrection against Saddam, who had gassed Halabja in 1988. You also had a few Shia Islamist parties, who had been based in Iran or Syria or London. And then a few individuals like, for example, Ahmed Chalabi, who was a secular Shia who was close to the Bush administration. Their interests were, first, to remove Saddam, but second, to become powerful.

There are three big decisions the CPA made in the early days of the occupation which would destroy the state. The first decision was the disbanding of the military. They also removed the border guards, removed the police. Why? Because many of these exiled actors also had their own armed groups. They didnt trust the Iraqi military, because one day it could come back and remove them from power. So they designed a system in which Iraqs military would never be strong again. Thats why, when ISIS emerges later on, only a few thousand fighters are able to take a third of the country, and the military just flees. Thats why Iraqs been unstable, because there hasnt been a coherent monopoly on violence by the state.

The second decision is that they institutionalized ethno-sectarianism. These exiled groups coming back, especially the Arab groups going back to Baghdad or other cities where they havent been for decades, faced a question: How were they going to claim and build constituencies? How were they going to speak on behalf of these people who they havent really met? The way to do it is to develop a political system thats based instead on identities. You create these constituencies which institutionalized ethnic and sectarian divides, and gave them the ideological power that they needed to represent people that they didnt know.

And the third big decision they made was de-Baathification, which was meant to remove Saddams party, the Baath Party, from power. Instead of just removing the inner circle, this group of exiles working with the Americans removed over 40,000 civil servants the entire human capital of the state, all of the service ministries, like the ministry of electricity, teachers, hospitals. In Saddams Iraq, you had to be a member of the Baath Party to have these jobs at a senior level. All of these people are removed, and it is a massive mistake, because it guts the state. But in place of those people, these parties were now able to hire their own people, who may not have known exactly what they were doing as such, but they were loyal to the parties. Iraq is a very wealthy state its annual budget can be up to or even more than $100 billion a year so having these civil service positions gave these parties access to Iraqs wealth.

The U.S. was simultaneously suppressing movements for freedom from foreign domination at the same time as facilitating the formation of a constitution and an electoral process to free Iraq. What legacy does that tension leave in a countrys political identity?

Mansour: Well, if you look at the kind of the insurgencies against the system and against the Americans that arise immediately after the invasion and occupation, there are two big parts. One is the Sunnis, who didnt have the same type of access to political parties as the Kurds and the Shia did, who were building this new state. They were excluded from it, because they werent part of the opposition. They feel like theyre not getting their fair share. And this begins to form a new opposition, and part of that opposition turns into these Salafi and jihadist groups, Sunni groups that create insurgencies, Al Qaeda, and the network that eventually formed ISIS.

On the other side, you have a big Shia group led by this populist cleric named Muqtada al Sadr. These are poor, urban Shia who had lived in Iraq the whole time, and because of that they werent included in the meetings held by the [old exiled] opposition. And theyre not happy with the American occupation coming in giving power to these different groups. They have this armed group, which is known as the Mahdi Army, and they launched an insurgency against the government and its American backers.

So the Americans are empowering specific rulers, especially those who came from outside, but by doing so excluding big parts of those who are in Iraq, who also want to have a voice and are not having that voice.

Author Naomi Klein said her "shock doctrine" thesis applied to Iraq in that the economic architecture of the country was dismantled and turned into a laboratory for radical free market policies. How did that inform Iraqs democratization process?

Mansour: There was this idea of just opening up Iraq. It has such immense oil wealth that it was very attractive. Iraq was historically a kind of centralized state, including health care run by the government. The neoconservatives come in, and they try and open everything up they want everything to be privatized. That then leads to further economic disparity and a bigger division between the wealthy and the rest of society.

After the first elections held in 2005 during the war some groups protested said they felt they were excluded based on their ethnic and religious backgrounds. Has there been progress since then in terms of trust and participation in the electoral process?

Mansour: No, its been the opposite. If you look at voter turnout, the highest voter turnout was in 2005. People at the time were like: Is this going to work? Is this actually going to change our lives? And also the voting seemed important you even had senior clerics, like the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, telling people to go out and to vote for Shia parties. From the Kurdish perspective, it was seen as we need to vote because this is our chance to never allow Saddam to come back again and those atrocities to happen again. Theres a huge push in that election in 2005 to get people to vote. The Sunnis dont vote, because theyre excluded, and other groups that were not part of the initial design, they dont vote but the turnout is the highest one.

Every subsequent election, that turnout has plummeted. Because if you had that hope that you may have had in 2005, well, four years later, you realize, wait a minute, we still dont have electricity, we still dont have basic services, the water is making us sick, we dont have medicine. And so each subsequent election 2010, 2014, 2018, 2021 the voter turnout goes down.

Im talking about grand corruption the political system is corruption. Its not illegal. Its the game that has developed.

Iraqis learned that elections arent actually where you can have your voice. Because unless youre one of those parties that came into power in 2003 and still rules,its not going to matter what the election results are the same people come together, they make a pact and they share the spoils of the state, and ordinary Iraqis dont benefit from that.

So instead, they try to protest. And you have protests in 2015-16. But more recently, and more crucially, in 2019, many young Iraqis came out to the streets what became known as the October protest movement in Baghdad and south of Iraq. And this was them demanding change, because the ballot boxes werent doing it for them. And instead of listening, this political system repressed them and killed over 600, wounded tens ofthousands. Since then, its become far more dangerous in Iraq to protest. Activists are being jailed. Theyre being assassinated. Theyre being kidnapped. So that is the state of the so-called democracy.

Beyond elections, how democratic is Iraq, and what are the chief obstacles to achieving a more democratic state?

Mansour: Iraqs judiciary is not independent. Iraqs parliament is unable to really bring about change, because parliamentarians act as rubber stamps for backroom deals made by the ruling parties. Iraqs ministries and senior civil service have all been captured by the political parties. These parties are designing a system in which they are empowered, in which they divert money from the government towards their own patronage networks with impunity. As such, the state is captured and unable to hold to account the ruling elite.

The corruption kills. We did this research at Chatham House, and we found that over 70% of medicine in Iraq is fake or expired. Although the Ministry of Health has billions annually in its budget to ensure medication, those billions are not translating into medicine, because theyre going to patronage networks. When Iraqis aresick and dont have access to proper medicine, that kills.

To me the biggest challenge to genuine democratization is corruption. And Im not talking about petty corruption, which is paying bribes. Im talking about grand corruption the political system is corruption. Its not illegal. Its the game that has developed.

Is there a way to assess how most Iraqis feel about the war in retrospect and the way it reshaped their country?

Mansour: A lot of Iraqis, on the eve of the invasion, were actually, perhaps, lets say in favor of it. Living under Saddam, especially with the sanctions, was awful. So, they cautiously said, Hang on a minute, are we actually going to get democracy? But very soon, that sense of cautious optimism plummeted, and they began to see that actually what the Americans are doing is creating a system that empowers this new elite and great corruption. So they started to regret it.

And I think if you ask most Iraqis today, its a very difficult question. Because many will say Saddam was bad, they shouldve removed him, but many Iraqis now have almost a sense of nostalgia for Saddam because of what theyve been through since. Theyve been through ISIS. Theyve been through civil wars. Theyve been through repression of protests. And so many across the country, even those who were for it, today say it was not worth it.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.

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Why the Iraq War brought corruption, not democracy, to Iraq - MSNBC