After 20 years of trauma, Iraq is struggling to recover

After two decades of rampant violence and political dysfunction, Iraq is at last showing signs of recovery. Most of the concrete blast walls that sliced up cities have come down. Baghdad, the capital, is reviving, towered over by a new central bank. The road to the airport, once dubbed the world’s most dangerous because of the snipers along the way, is lined with private universities and housing estates. “Before, we had to clear roads of landmines,” says the head of a paramilitary engineering unit. “Now we clear people’s sewage.”

Though politics is still messy and corrupt, with parliament and government subject to bitter horse-trading between parties in hock to sectarian militias, a measure of representative democracy has been achieved. The Shia majority, suppressed under the vicious Sunni-led dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, is sitting pretty, its leaders content to reap the rewards of power and patronage. The application of religious laws has softened. Unveiled women again walk the streets.