Both my parents are Iraqi Arabs from Baghdad. They escaped Iraq in the early 90s during Saddam's infamous Faith Campaign, where both my relatively leftist dad and my shia mother both fell under some prosecution. They left to Syria and then got resettled in the US thanks to a UN program. I speak fluent Arabic and meet up every year with my extended family in Jordan or Turkey, as both countries are relatively safe for Iraqis.
AMA about Iraqi politics, Iraqi society and the general cultural and political state of the Arab World. I will answer a few questions directly, but I'll keep the rest for late night today as I will go on a long ass drive in an hour.
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That is a very difficult question. In my opinion, there's no direct hope honestly. The question of left values and their growth in the Middle East is connected with three entities that have to be destroyed or weakened. The three entities are the US, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council in that order. As long as the US exists, the other two will both directly and indirectly subvert any attempt of real solidarity between the people. Look at Egypt from 2011 to 2015. In 2011, millions of Egyptians stepped up in amazing solidarity and overthrew the military dictatorship that had subverted the people for 60 years and had run a horrible neoliberal experiment for 40 years. In one year after the revolution, free elections were held and a real political life had emerged where you could find socialists debating islamists on a random street corner. The socialist candidate unfortunately lost but performed incredibly well and massively overperformed polls. Anyway, the "wrong" islamists win, the Muslim Brotherhood were in power after 100 years of fighting. Their win was entirely legitmate, but they threatened the Israeli-Egyptian "peace" agreement and western business interests. Within a year, a US-Israel-Saudi-UAE-backed military coup with upper class liberals supporting it ousted the legitimate government and massacred thousands of Brotherhood supporters in the streets. The coup leader Sisi is now still president after winning two bogus elections and changing the term limit laws. As you can see, nothing truly grassroots can happen as long as those three entities exist
I assume you're talking about hamdeen sabahi being the socialist that overperformed polls but still lost unfortunately right?