BAGHDAD, IRAQ — In just the last two years, Baghdad has transformed. Traffic flows unimpeded through the former Green Zone. A new highway abuts the Tigris River in the heart of the city. Overpasses and elevated highways now cross Baghdad’s infamous traffic circles. The multibillion-dollar U.S. Embassy once dominated the shore of the Tigris River; now high-rise apartments dwarf it. Big name hotels — the Movenpick, the Rixos — are nearing completion and will soon cater to the hundreds of businessmen coming through Baghdad daily for their share of the deals the country is looking to sign.
In Washington, partisans and pundits see President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as original sin, the marquee example of forever war that both Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump promised to end; Iraqis have a more nuanced take.
Iraqis say a lot of the money funding the investments is Iraqi. Iraqi businessmen may seek outside partners and franchise rights, but they have their own money to spend. Real estate is often a mechanism for money laundering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, one of the most corrupt regions in the Middle East, locals say new apartment complexes sit empty or have occupancy rates lower than 20 percent. Visiting friends in Erbil and Sulaymani’s newest complexes can be akin to walking into ghost towers, with lights off and signs of life only in one or two units per floor. In Baghdad, though, burgeoning population makes housing projects a necessity: Sixty to 70 percent of the country’s population was not born when the war began in 2003. The change in generation has infused new energy into the country.
Iraq is also approaching a generational change in its politics. Many of its post-war prime ministers — Ayad Allawi, Nouri al Maliki, Haider al Abadi, Adil Abdul-Mahdi — are in poor health, as are factional leaders such as Badr Corps chief Hadi al Amiri and Masoud Barzani. Younger politicians such as Muqtada al Sadr and Qais al Khazali now try to reinvent themselves.
While Yemen’s Houthis launched attacks against Israel during and after the 12-day Israel-Iran war, Iraqi factions and Shi’ite militias, with very few exceptions, stood down. Iraqi Shi’ite leaders wrote to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to protest efforts by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to encourage some militias to take up arms. Simply put, with business booming and Baghdad 2025 increasingly feeling like Dubai 1995, Iraqi politicians feel they have a good thing going that they do not want derailed by conflict.
Trump both eschews entrapping the United States in wars and favors business over either diplomatic or military strategies to further U.S. interests. His choice of envoys — Steve Witkoff and Massad Boulos, respectively for the Middle East and Africa — reflect this.
Yet Witkoff has not yet come to Baghdad. This is a dangerous omission, given how too many in and around Trump view Iraq through the lens of 2003 rather than 2025. The two countries could not be more different.
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President George W. Bush imagined an Iraq that embraced democracy, eschewed terrorism, and thrived economically. He was not wrong in Iraq’s potential, only in the timeline necessary to achieve it. Rather than look at Iraq as original sin and a symbol of “forever war,” Trump should send Witkoff to see the new Iraq in which Egyptians, Emiratis, Turks, and Chinese all get wealthy, but Americans are inexplicably absent.
Israel neutered Hezbollah, and a Turkish-backed Islamist group ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad. Investing in Iraq’s thriving economy could be as effective to peel Iraq away from Iranian ambitions of an “Axis of Resistance.” Indeed, the biggest gift Trump could give to Iraq’s marginalized rejectionist groups as Iraq heads again to elections would be military action.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.