For two decades, I have never been optimistic about the political order built in Iraq after 2003. My scepticism was not emotional but structural: the state was engineered in a way that carried its own failure within it. Even Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Iraq, eventually admitted that Washington had “created a failed state in Iraq.” That belated confession merely echoes what Iraqis have lived through for twenty years—a political system rooted in sectarian apportionment, a rentier economy distributed through party networks, and armed groups outside the state that guarantee the survival of those networks regardless of who sits in government. Yet this long arc of pessimism is now confronted by a hesitant temptation: the urge to pin hope […]