On the fourteenth of July, Ali Al-Zaidi sat beside President Trump in the Oval Office and received the sort of welcome Iraqi leaders dream about. There was talk of “a lot of deals,” of Iraq’s “tremendous potential,” of a new chapter between the two nations, again. At one point the president congratulated his guest on his election victory. It was a generous compliment, considering that no Iraqi has ever cast a vote for the person of Ali Al-Zaidi. His name appeared on no ballot last November; he was not a candidate. Even the Washington Post’s news desk felt obliged to note the fact under the headline “Trump congratulated Iraq’s prime minister on election. He wasn’t on the ballot.” The same newspaper’s opinion pages had, a day earlier, carried an essay under Al-Zaidi’s own byline announcing that Iraq is ready for a new American partnership. The choreography was flawless.
The Hill welcomed “a new chapter for U.S.-Iraq ties.” The Middle East Institute asked, hopefully, whether this was a new US-Iraq relationship. The special envoy praised the prime minister’s “fresh leadership” and his “bold new agenda.” Running through all of it was a single admiring observation, repeated in different words by different institutions: the new man says all the right things. The Atlantic Council, in its preview of the visit, was refreshingly candid about what this actually meant. Form, it advised, may matter more than substance; Al-Zaidi needed to charm the president and give him confidence that America was backing the right leader. That was written by his boosters, not his critics, and it deserves to be read twice.
Of course he says all the right things. The right things were drafted for him weeks in advance. In the middle of June, a full month before his plane left Baghdad, the prime minister’s office and the American envoy issued a joint statement announcing a shared vision, complete with the disarmament and disbandment of armed factions. The July performance had a rehearsal in June, staged with coaches who know precisely what this White House likes to hear. Fluency in Washington’s language is a service that can be arranged, but it tells us nothing about what the man can deliver in Baghdad.
Then there is the label that has attached itself to him: the Trump of the Middle East. Victoria Taylor of the Atlantic Council relayed the comparison while cautioning that the reality is much more complicated, and she is right, though one can politely go further. Donald Trump built a global brand across half a century and won two national elections. Ali Al-Zaidi, at forty-one the youngest prime minister in Iraq’s history, owns a mid-sized Baghdad conglomerate, a television channel, a private university, and a bank that the US State Department sanctioned for money laundering in February of 2024. He has never campaigned nor faced a voter. As for the outsider image, the businessman untouched by politics, it survives only if one ignores the fact that he is a son-in-law of Faiq Zaidan, the head of the Supreme Judicial Council and arguably the most powerful unelected man in Iraq. His nomination emerged from a Coordination Framework backroom settlement, brokered among the same familiar names and concluded under Zaidan’s patronage, after a short period of deadlock that followed the election that he sat out entirely. The outsider is, on inspection, the consummate insider: a man with no politics of his own and every connection that matters.
Renad Mansour of Chatham House calls the celebrated anti-corruption drive “a veneer of going after the militias.” The Green Zone raids that made headlines have swept up figures whom Iraqi critics dismiss as small fish and expendable fall guys, while the Coordination Framework has pointedly declined to give the prime minister authority to pursue anyone linked to the armed factions. Muqtada al-Sadr’s millions of followers boycotted November’s election, having judged the whole process corrupt, and hold no stake in this government’s survival. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq rejected the outcomes of the Washington visit even before Al-Zaidi’s plane had landed. An opinion in Al Jazeera put the ground truth in a single line: Iraq’s prime minister carries the title, but not the power.
I have been watching Baghdad’s anointed men since 2003. What strikes me about this moment is not Al-Zaidi himself, who may well believe everything he said in Washington. It is the unanimity. Watch how quickly the think tanks, the columnists, and the officials converge on a single story and stop asking questions of it. We have seen this machinery at work before, and we know what it produces.
In December 2001 it produced Hamid Karzai, another elegant man who said all the right things, installed by a conference of foreign powers and local partners rather than by any ballot and feted in Washington to the point of a standing ovation before Congress. From 2003, the CIA delivered cash to his office in suitcases and shopping bags, tens of millions of dollars, what came to be called “ghost money.” Kabul Bank collapsed in 2010 under nearly a billion dollars of embezzlement by the connected elite around him. When the Afghanistan Papers were published in 2019, an American official summed up two decades in one sentence: the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States. The point is not that Al-Zaidi is Karzai. Iraq is not Afghanistan, and history rarely repeats itself so neatly. The point is that Washington’s savior-making machinery is unchanged, and the machinery itself is what corrupts. Anoint a man, flood him with money, praise his every phrase, and decline to look too closely because he is “ours”: this recipe has been tested, and the results are documented.
Now weigh the pledges against the calendar. The militias disarmed and the remaining American troops gone, both by the thirtieth of September, promised aloud in the very week American bombs were falling on Iran and Iraq’s armed factions were announcing their defiance. Mansour calls the timeline almost impossible, and he is being diplomatic. Meanwhile, the Chevron pipeline agreement and an oil fund of half a million barrels a day move briskly forward. The money, at least, will arrive on schedule; however, the disarmament is questionable.
And while the prime minister collected his applause, drones appeared over Erbil. On the evening of the fifteenth, with Al-Zaidi still in Washington, coalition air defenses downed eight explosive-laden drones over the city in under an hour, close to the airport that hosts American and coalition troops. It was the first attack of its kind since the fragile ceasefire of April. No group has claimed responsibility, and none needs to; suspicion falls where it always falls, on Iran and the armed factions aligned with it, the very militias Al-Zaidi had just promised to disarm. Baghdad’s habits in such moments are well established. When drones struck the Region’s oil fields last summer, the Kurdistan authorities blamed the Hashd al-Shaabi, a force formally integrated into Iraq’s own military, and Baghdad rejected the accusation. Hold that image steady: a man in Washington vowing to disarm the militias by the end of September, while unclaimed drones fall over Erbil and no one in his government will say who sent them or what they would do to stop such attacks in the future.
Part of the reason the stage belonged to Al-Zaidi at all is that the Kurds, quarreling among themselves over government formation, left it empty. Most Kurdish officials and party leaders greeted Al-Zaidi’s appointment with talk of a new era of security, stability, and peace, and the hope is understandable; a functioning Baghdad that pays salaries and honors its oil arrangements would change Kurdish lives. But we have watched every anointed man since 2003 arrive with American applause and depart with American regret, and we have learned to count the distance between what is said in Washington and what lands on Erbil. Perhaps Al-Zaidi will be different. The people applauding him have no way of knowing, and it does not appear to trouble them.