Iraq: The Unending AGONY Of A Modern-Day Colony | Hussein Askary

The unbroken thread running through the conversation is that Iraq’s suffering is not an accident of history or simply the result of local failures; it is the outcome of deliberate geopolitical design, sustained economic control, and the systematic destruction of modern state structures. The exchange with Hussein Askary reframes Iraq not as a failed nation in isolation but as a modern-day colony whose political economy and social fabric have been reshaped to serve outside powers. The consequences are manifold: ruined development prospects, engineered sectarianism, and a population forced back into identity-based survival. Understanding this requires tracing imperial patterns, the mechanics of post-invasion control, and the alternatives that could restore sovereignty and dignity. ## Historical roots: imperial competition and the making of the modern Middle East The conversation situates Iraq’s plight within a century-long pattern of great-power rivalry. From the late Ottoman collapse to the secret deals of Sykes-Picot, the territorial lines, political elites, and economic institutions of the region were crafted by outside hands. Colonial mapping did more than redraw borders; it reconfigured social hierarchies, installed pliant rulers, and created dependency relationships that long outlived formal empire. Askary emphasizes that imperial control did not end with empire’s formal demise; it simply evolved. British and French interests were taken up by new actors, chiefly the United States, which after World War II assumed the role of guarantor of a global order that often meant preserving access to resources and strategic footholds. This history matters because it explains why some states in the region developed differently. Peripheral Gulf sheikhdoms, for example, were managed as reliable oil suppliers and maintained a degree of stability conducive to accumulation. By contrast, countries with stronger nationalist traditions or richer indigenous state structures—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran—became sites of contestation. When local leaders sought to redirect resource wealth into development, that ambition often met concerted external resistance. Thus, the region’s chronic instability is not merely the result of cultural or religious factors but flows from long-standing geopolitical calculation. ## The 2003 invasion and occupation as a new mode of colonial governance A central insight from the exchange is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not a conventional one-off military aggression followed by withdrawal; it inaugurated a prolonged form of occupation that restructured Iraqi governance and economy. Askary explains how the occupation went beyond removing a regime: it imposed institutional arrangements that favored external control. The occupation engineered a political system rife with clientelism, sectarian quotas, and weakened central authority—conditions that ensured Iraqi policy would be pliant to foreign interests and that local elites would compete for rents rather than invest in public goods. That occupation also altered the very notion of sovereignty. Control was exerted through advisory missions, embedded contractors, and security arrangements that limited Iraq’s independent action. The result has been a polity that looks sovereign by name but is constrained in practice. This hybridity—formal independence coexisting with substantive subordination—captures the essence of a modern-day colony: a nation whose institutions serve external agendas under the guise of local legitimacy. ## Economic control: oil revenues, banking routes, and the politics of theft Perhaps the most arresting claim in the conversation is the contention that Iraq’s oil revenues have been systematically diverted from public development since 2003. Askary highlights how the architecture of oil payments—funneled into accounts under control of U.S. institutions—functioned as a tool of economic custody. By routing export payments to foreign-held accounts and exercising influence over how those funds were disbursed, the occupation managers could block investment in long-term industrialization, technological upgrading, and social infrastructure. The consequence is a deliberate truncation of development. Instead of channeling resource wealth into manufacturing, education, and health, the state apparatus was steered toward creating a consumer-oriented rent economy. Such an economy deepens dependency: imports replace local production, social services are privatized or neglected, and political elites survive by mediating access to scarce resources. This economic capture is central to the idea of modern colonialism—not merely territorial control, but the management of a country’s lifeblood so as to prevent autonomous advancement. ## Sectarianism, religion, and the engineered fragmentation of society A recurring theme in the discussion is the instrumental use of identity politics to neutralize cohesive state-building. Askary traces how the dismantling of secular institutions and the imposition of sectarian constitutional arrangements turned Iraq into a patchwork of competing identity blocs. Where a functioning state once mediated between communities, the post-invasion order deepened sectarian divisions by legally privileging ethnicity and religion as organizing principles. The conversation pushes back against simplistic explanations that cast religion itself as the cause of violence. Instead, it argues that religious identity became politically salient precisely because the modern nation-state was destroyed. When social safety nets, public authority, and national narratives collapse, people turn to tribe, sect, and faith for protection. Moreover, external actors deliberately promoted Islamist movements at various historical junctures as counterweights to secular nationalism. The result is a feedback loop: external manipulation fosters fragmentation, fragmentation legitimizes identity politics, and identity politics perpetuate weakness and dependency. ## Regional dynamics: the heartland versus the periphery Askary’s perspective reframes regional inequalities not as natural outcomes but as the product of different levels of external interest and control. Periphery states—some Gulf monarchies, for instance—were deemed useful and thus managed for stability and accumulation. Heartland states, meanwhile, posed alternative development models and therefore attracted containment, intervention, and destabilization. Iraq’s attempts at mid-20th-century development, and later its recovery after the Iran-Iraq War, were interrupted by shifting geopolitical priorities and punitive interventions. The conversation also points to the evolving context of a multipolar world. The emergence of alternative economic frameworks—most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative—offers new possibilities for infrastructure-led development that prioritize productivity and connectivity over rent extraction. For Iraq and its neighbors, engagement with such projects could offer a path out of the extractive model, but only if political sovereignty is restored and institutions refashioned to serve public ends rather than clientelist short-term interests. ## Paths to recovery: rebuilding sovereignty through infrastructure and economic sovereignty What does recovery look like? The interlocutors outline a pragmatic blueprint: restore control over resources, invest oil revenues in long-term productive capacity, and rebuild institutions that transcend sectarian blocs. Central to this is the idea that sovereignty is not merely symbolic; it requires economic levers. Reclaiming control over oil revenues, renegotiating foreign banking and contractual arrangements, and directing funds to industrial, agricultural, and technological projects would lay the groundwork for durable development. The conversation stresses the role of regional cooperation and infrastructure connectivity in enabling this transformation. Large-scale project

Iraq: The Unending AGONY Of A Modern- Day Colony | Hussein Askary The US and its "coalition of the willing" did not only illegally attack and invade Iraq, it also never left. The 22-year long military occupation is going hand in hand with the political and economic ruin of a 40 million people nation—another crime of epic proportion by the defenders of the "Rules Based International Order". Today I’m talking to Hussein Askary who is the Iraqi-Swedish Vice-Chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden and the West Asia Coordinator for the International Schiller Institute. Hussein has been working as a strategic and economic analyst since 1996. Today we want to talk about West Asia and Iraq. #M3 Goal number two in Iraq was not to take the oil, but to reshape the whole Iraqi society and also make sure that Iraq does not use its oil money for anything beneficial for the people, like technological, industrial, economic, social, and cultural development. This money would be purely used to create a consumer society, which we have now in Iraq. So the United States made sure from the first day it took over Iraq that it controlled every dollar of oil exports. Actually, the oil money is put in an account. All the money from Iraqi oil exports is sent by the buyers to a Federal Reserve Bank in New York, in an account there which has been controlled by the American president since 2003. What the elites in the United States and Britain wanted to do is to set a precedent for how they can reshape the fate of whole peoples because they have the power to do that. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Hussein Askary, who is the Iraqi-Swedish vice chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden and the West Asia coordinator for the International Schiller Institute. Hussein has been working as a strategic and economic analyst since 1996, and today we want to talk about West Asia and Iraq. So, Hussein, welcome. #M3 Thank you, Pascal, for inviting me. It's my pleasure. #M2 Well, very happy to have you because I wanted to have a discussion about Iraq, but Iraq inside the larger region for a while, because I think a lot of things that are going on are very much connected -- 1 of 19 -- to Syria, Iran, and Turkey as well. So I think you're one of the perfect people to tell us about this discussion. You left Baghdad, or you left Iraq, at the age of 23 in 1991. You told me you had to flee due to warfare and state repression, and then you came to Sweden in the '90s and you've been working there ever since. Over all of these years, can you tell me a little bit about how these experiences impacted you and your analysis of what's going on in world affairs? #M3 Yeah, well, when I left Iraq in 1991, it was immediately after Desert Storm, the so-called Gulf War. There were many Gulf Wars, but that was one of them. We call it the Kuwait War. It came after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. And then when Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw peacefully, the U.S. and the international community mobilized a global force to get Iraq out. Immediately after Kuwait was liberated, there was an uprising in Iraq, which was pushed also from outside. But then it failed, and so people had to flee for fear of retaliation by the Iraqi regime. My family was among those. I was studying in Baghdad, but my family was living in northern Iraq, in Sulaymaniyah, although I'm not Kurdish. But I grew up among the Kurds in northern Iraq. So I ended up spending about a year in refugee camps in Iran. I worked with the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in refugee camps. I was an interpreter. That was my education. And then after that, I managed, with some help, to come to Norway first in 1992. I stayed there for a few years and then moved to Sweden, where the Schiller Institute has an office, because I wanted to be active in both understanding what happened to my country and the global developments that led to that. As you said, things happening in West Asia, the so-called Middle East, which is the wrong name, are always connected to global politics. I was interested in understanding strategic issues and economic issues, and the Schiller Institute gave me a great deal of knowledge, both about history and economics, and how economics are related to that. You remember 1991 was when the Soviet Union collapsed, and there was a new world order—the unipolar world, the unipolar moment came to the stage. And that's what shaped many of the things that happened since then. But now that unipolar world is melting down. There's a multilateral world emerging. According to many geopolitically-minded realists, this is a moment full of danger. It's also full of opportunities to have a new world order based on economic cooperation, and so on. The idea of the Belt and Road Initiative was very important in developing my own capabilities of analysis and also promoting this idea of peace through economic development. The Belt and Road Initiative was very, very important. At the Schiller Institute, we have been working for decades on what we call the Eurasian Land Bridge or the World Land Bridge to build infrastructure corridors between Asia, Europe, Africa, and extend that to the Americas. So we were screaming alone in the field until China came and President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. That was a defining moment in many respects. My own experience -- 2 of 19 -- as an Iraqi coming out of war—I lived through wars before I left Iraq—but the connection with global developments really gave me much to think about. First and foremost, the treatment my people received from the international community, from the so-called rules-based order, the civilized world, the free world, showed me that there's a great deal of hypocrisy and that the image given around the world does not fit the reality. So I'm a bit immune in that sense from the propaganda coming from the unipolar world. But I look at every case on its own, and I try to analyze, I try to study as much as possible. Being in Europe, working with Europeans for many years, living in Europe, being active in Europe, but also having very strong connections to my colleagues in the United States, learning a lot about American history and American politics, has given me a multidimensional perspective on developments in the world. Therefore, when I see the situation in West Asia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, all these things, I see them from a much larger context. With my knowledge of the region, my knowledge of the language, Arabic, and the history of the region, the combination becomes very, very fruitful. #M2 So what is the big picture to you? Why is it that West Asia has been suffering so much for the entire last century, basically? On and off, here and there, you know, wars and devastation and millions of people, yourself included, fleeing their homes. What is the ultimate or the most immediate cause of that? #M3 Well, I think the main cause of that is we have had an imperialist competition in the world. And this region is very, very strategic. It's between three continents, two oceans. And lately, you know, at least since the beginning of the 20th century, oil was found there. The strategic competition between major superpowers was very active. We remember the Great Game between Russia and Britain. We had the emergence of Germany as a major economic and strategic power at the end of the 19th century and the attempt to break the maritime control by the British Empire through alliances on land, the Berlin-Baghdad railway development, and so on and so forth. So geopolitics, big power geopolitics, played a key role in shaping the fate of that region. And it's strategically very important. With all the oil that was found there, it became, as we say in our countries, a curse rather than a gift to the people there. So major geopolitics played a key role in shaping that region. And, of course, we had a failed transition from the control of the Ottoman Empire when the nations of the region were hoping by the end of World War I to become independent and build modern societies. That hope, that promise was betrayed by the British and the French, who had already planned to inherit the Ottoman Empire through secret treaties like the Sykes-Picot Agreement. While the war was still ongoing in 1916, they were planning how to divide the region into French territories and -- 3 of 19 -- British and Russian spheres of influence. The Russians withdrew after the October Revolution, the 1917 revolution, so the new leaders in Russia withdrew. Thus, the French and the British had to decide the fate of this region. They were manipulating, dividing and conquering, and redrawing the borders of these regions, installing leaders. In Iraq, they put a king there; they put a king in Jordan; they took out the king from what was Saudi Arabia, or the leader there, the Hashemite, and they installed the Al Saud as leaders. They controlled the whole political, social, and economic structures of that region until at least the 1960s, and most of the Gulf countries became independent in 1971. So these major powers played a big role in dividing and conquering, controlling the resources, and then you had also the British planting what they call a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, which has been the source of much of the destabilization in this whole region until now. We saw the genocide in Gaza. We see now what is going on in the West Bank. And this is by design what the British Empire planned to keep this area boiling and to be able to control it from outside. After World War II, the United States got into the game. President Franklin Roosevelt actually had different ideas for the post-World War era. Many people don't really realize that. He was not intending to keep the British Empire or join the British Empire. His idea was to demolish the British, French, Belgian, and other empires and have these nations free and working with the United States for economic development. That was his main thrust, that these nations should be independent. Even on the question of Palestine and the Palestinians, he was trying to find a solution with the king of Saudi Arabia. But things didn't turn out well. Roosevelt died, and Truman became president. Truman was an admirer of the British Empire, so he continued the special relationship with the British. And the imperialist thrust continued even after World War II. So this whole situation has been, you know, not just the responsibility of the people of the region. Of course, they have a responsibility to liberate their countries too. But the powers that control everything, and the Soviet Union even contributed to that, made it impossible to find peace—a stable condition where people could use the natural resources and the human resources of the region for the development of the people there. So that's the reality there. #M2 It's such a, in one way, a very, very rich region, as you said, and you can see how rich and how wealthy some countries in West Asia can get if they have stability and peace, right? The Emirates, Qatar, and also Oman, which we don't usually hear a lot about, are developing and doing a fine job in the region, right? But then the heartland, in a way, includes Iraq, Syria, and extends all the way to Iran, right? There was a long time when Iraq and Iran were deadlocked in a bloody conflict, right? Why is it that the heartland struggles? Because the periphery seems to do better in a way, or am I misreading that? -- 4 of 19 -- #M3 No, the countries in the periphery, like the Gulf countries, were under British rule, so it was important for the British to have stability there for a long time. They had special treaties with those countries. The problem with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and to a certain extent, Turkey, is that they are more independently minded people. 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