“Reassure yourselves”How Mustafa al-Kadhimi tried to govern Iraq without fear

 

“Itma’annu” — reassure yourselves. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi (2020–2022) repeated the word in speech after speech, to the public and to the political class, until it traveled far beyond both.

Set aside the precise occasions on which he said it. Taken together, those repeated messages of reassurance marked something almost unprecedented in Iraqi political rhetoric — a discourse historically built on fervor, alarm, warning and pessimism.

Not everyone received it the way he intended. His government was battling economic, security and political storms all at once, in a compressed window of time, and some heard “reassure yourselves” as an attempt to paint an idealized picture over a catastrophic reality.

The reality was, in fact, dangerous. Kadhimi’s government was formed in the shadow of the bloody Tishreen protests, the crushing pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a collapsing global economy — above all the crash in oil prices, on which Iraq depends almost entirely. Then came the repeated confrontations with militias, which revealed to everyone just how deeply they had penetrated the state: besieging the government palace, striking the prime minister’s home with drones. And finally the elections Kadhimi oversaw with integrity — elections whose results enraged powerful factions that decided to blame him for their defeat.

 

An alternative fate

Amid all of that, it was strange to watch a Middle Eastern leader stand before his people and say: reassure yourselves. Some of Iraq’s intellectuals bristled at the same moment the militias did, if for different reasons. Some had wanted from Kadhimi what an earlier generation wanted from Abdul Karim Qasim (1958–1963) decades before: “Execute!” — as if death were Iraq’s only possible destiny, and blood the only road to power in Baghdad.

For the armed factions and parts of the political leadership, the objection ran deeper. A reassured public was never part of their calculus. The public had to remain tense, afraid, anxious about tomorrow — that is what guarantees its submission to a cabal of blood and corruption.

On the surface, Kadhimi may simply have been a different kind of ruler — perhaps one who never presented himself as a ruler at all, which is why he busied himself calming the population rather than terrifying it. Those close to him say it went deeper: a personal conviction that shaped every position later interpreted so carelessly. Kadhimi believed, at bottom, that Iraq was possible — at a moment when everyone else, whether brawling over parliamentary seats, watching from outside the theater, or perfecting the art of bitter jokes, believed just as deeply that Iraq was impossible. An entire politics had been built on that collective despair.

 

A politics that permits optimism

The real collision between Kadhimi and the gunmen — and the political class that serves as the vessel of their power — began from a principle he expressed in different forms: Iraq is not a complicated country, however often it is described as one. Its simplicity, he argued, is the secret of its ability to endure and to rise again after every fall.

The equation, as he saw it, was clear. Across the centuries, as nations sorted themselves into single identities of race, religion, sect or creed — often through catastrophic waves of elimination — Iraq, sitting at the collision point of tectonic, human and doctrinal plates, survived with its diversity intact. That is the core of its simplicity: a country where everyone, across the ages, attempted annihilation and failed, and where people ultimately chose coexistence, armed with an almost genetic understanding of difference and its necessity.

Kadhimi understood that his place at the heart of a historic rupture — Tishreen’s confrontation between a society aware of its diversity and a ruling class blind to it — was not divine fate but a reflection of Iraq’s simple equation, in which the most complicated crises are the closest to resolution.

He described the dangerous armed men as uncomplicated in themselves — except when they hand the accumulated experience of their genes to outsiders — and believed a healthy environment could resolve the crisis they represent. He did not seek confrontation with them. He wanted them to feel that the state is the final destiny of this small patch of the planet, convinced that when the state dawns, they too would become children of that dawn.

 

White solutions

Iraq holds vast and varied wealth. But a historical trajectory stretching back decades — not merely to the American occupation — produced a breakdown in how Iraqis understand the social economy, the state economy, and the meaning of rent and where to begin investing it.

At a moment when oil was selling for next to nothing and COVID was ravaging the world, Kadhimi kept repeating that Iraq’s economic solutions were easier than those of most countries: that with rational policy, Iraq could overcome its crises, activate its internal productive forces, and convert oil rent into productive rent.

The economic equation, for him, was equally uncomplicated. A people whom successive governments had cornered into public employment for decades, and whom wars and international sanctions had cut off from the world’s development, should not be blamed for the state of its economy. Instead, he argued for “white solutions” — measures that would gradually align Iraq with the global economy and open the doors to investment hungry to operate inside the country, generating millions of jobs to replace the government payroll.

 

Dari

When he spoke about “Dari,” his large-scale housing project, he would ask those around him: “Why does the state serve only its own institutional cadre? Why don’t we give the unemployed and the self-employed the same right to decent housing as the state employee? The policy of lavishing care on employees at the expense of everyone else has produced piles of idle employees — and piles of people at the doors of institutions begging for jobs that no longer exist.”

The questions were self-evident — and dangerous. For the first time in decades, a head of government embraced equality between his state’s cadre, the backbone of the electoral vote, and the marginalized who never managed to join the bloated project of the state.

On foreign policy, the accusations rained down on him. They had no reasonable basis beyond the fact that the regional and international welcome extended to Kadhimi — as a person and as a prime minister — was unfamiliar after 2003, and those buried under layers of over-interpretation had nothing left but hypotheses of cosmic conspiracy.

The picture, as those close to him tell it, was as uncomplicated as ever. Kadhimi as a person embraces optimism and candor; as a prime minister representing a historic country, he had to speak to others with ease, confidence, an open chest — and simplicity. His presence was real rather than distorted, his words honest rather than coded in blind diplomatic jargon: the Arabs are Iraq’s strategic depth, Iran and Turkey are historic neighbors, and Iraq has friendships around the world it must cultivate. That is how everyone else read history and its currents — even if some Iraqis failed to read it.

…….

He left the office of chief executive the way he arrived: at peace with his convictions. He did not look back when those drunk on false victories hurled stones and accusations at his heels — some of whom later retreated, and some of whom apologized. Perhaps sadness touched him, as it should. But the optimism never left him. As one witness recounts, at the moment of departure he turned to his driver and a friend sitting beside him and said: “Itma’annu” — reassure yourselves.