This is good if true:
Iraqi leaders are talking about “post-war reforms” and at the top of the list is the popular demand to curb corruption. Mosul needs a lot of that right now since all the government money spent on reconstruction means lots of opportunity for corruption and that generates short and long term problems because a lot of the repairs and new structures will be sub-standard in order to pay for the bribes and theft. While many of the usual offenders see this as a chance to play it straight others see it as a challenge with big financial rewards for those who can pull it off.
Most Iraqis now know there is a connection between corruption and the overall health of the economy, public safety and general welfare. Saddam Hussein and his predecessors were notoriously (and often shamelessly) corrupt and while Iraq is still one of the most corrupt nations on the planet there some local nations that are living examples of how less corruption means life gets better.
Sadly, there is a lot to talk about. The Iraqis need our help. A "surge" of FBI and court specialists might be just the thing. Our allies already democratic could help, of course. It's a large job. Start soon.
Also:
With ISIL no longer a major threat Iraq has surprised Iran (and many others outside the Arab world) by rebuilding relations with Sunni Arab neighbors and telling Iran to back off with any plans it had to dominate Iraqi politics. Senior Shia Arab religious and political leaders have been leaning this way for a long time and Iran thought the war against ISIL was an opportunity to weaken the traditional Shia Arab distrust of Iran. That did not work.
I know that liberals have long argued that the Iraq War just got rid of Saddam to turn Iraq over to Iran (if that's bad, why do you support the Iran nuclear non-deal? Just asking ...). I said repeatedly that this was nonsense and that the only reason Iran made inroads was that we walked away from Iraq at the end of 2011.
Without our strong presence, the Iraqis had no choice but to appease Iran; with a secondary effect of Iraqi Shia rulers selecting army leaders for loyalty rather than honesty and military skills just in case there was a coup outside of elections. Hence the June 2014 collapse of the Iraqi security forces across northern Iraq in the face of the wide-scale ISIL uprising.
And without American military forces monitoring the Iraqi officer corps, we were unable to do anything about it as we did until 2011. I know a lot of people complained that the collapse proved our training was wasted, but that complaint rests on the idiocy of thinking "training" is something you do to an army and then put it on a shelf until needed, rather than an ongoing process that unravels without constant effort.
So let's hope that President Trump is wiser after Iraq War 2.0 than President Obama was after the Iraq War when he pulled our troops out in 2011 and declared a glorious victory that would stand without our efforts the way Japan, Germany, Italy, and South Korean needed to become free and prosperous members of the West.
We must keep troops and civilian advisers in Iraq for decades to come. If not, we'll see Iraq War 3.0.
