Five years after the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein, Magdi Abdelhadi asks if the country's neighbours have yet benefited from the promised regional stability


A film about extreme poverty and Al-Qaeda-style insurgency in a shanty town near Cairo is playing to packed houses in the Egyptian capital. Its director, Khaled Youssef, says the film, Heena Maysara (Waiting for Better Times) is about the organic relationship between what's happening in Iraq and the political and social situation in Egypt.

Part of a poster advertising the film Heena Maysara

The link between the two countries is the poverty that has driven millions of Egyptians over the years to escape to Iraq and other oil rich countries in the Gulf. At the centre of the film's plot is one such character. His family has been waiting for his return for years, hoping he will rescue them from poverty. Meanwhile, the authorities suspect he has joined Al-Qaeda and may have sneaked back to plot terrorist attacks in Egypt. The film ends in an apocalyptic scene, in which a militant cell blows the shanty town up to prevent the security forces from arresting its members.

It's a gloomy and artistic vision but it captures two important political themes, which can be traced back to what has happened in Iraq over the past five years and their impact on the wider region: fear that the instability and violence in Iraq could spill over to the wider region; and, dashed hopes as the Americans fail to achieve the building of an Iraq that will be a model for its neighbours to emulate.

Iraq - Five years on • BBC World Service is scheduling special programming to mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war on 20 March. This includes a four-part series, How Iraq's War Shaped Our World, with Hugh Sykes, Magdi Abdelhadi, Lyse Doucet and John Simpson. • In Return to Kurdistan Michael Goldfarb revisits Northern Iraq to see how the lives have changed of people he knew before the war. • There will be extensive BBC news coverage and a specially-commissioned BBC World Service poll on Iraq will be released on 17 March

Democracy activists say authoritarian Arab leaders have used this failure and fear of bloodshed as an excuse not to introduce genuine political reforms, arguing that wholesale democracy could lead to chaos as in Iraq. President Bashar Al Assad of Syria recently told American senators visiting Damascus that Western-style democracy was not suitable for Arab societies, citing the violence and turmoil in Iraq as a precedent.

It is hard to find many in the Arab world who disagree with this gloomy assessment. The consensus is that the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein have not made the Arab world a better place. And given that part of the justification for the war was to make Iraq a truly representative democracy for a region so lacking in democratic institutions, the past five years may have dealt a serious blow for democracy promotion in the Arab world.

Mona Makram Obeid, an Egyptian academic and liberal politician, says the war has opened a Pandora's box and "let out all kinds of worms". Worst of all is the sectarian 'worm', which may prove to be too difficult to put back. Violence between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq has cast its long shadow
over other Arab countries, where the two communities have lived in a precarious peace for generations. Relations between the sects have become particularly tense in Lebanon, due to the political crisis there.

Attacks on Iraqi Christians and the enforcement of a strict Islamic dress code on women there have also sent shock waves through the region's Christian minorities. Dr Obeid, herself an Egyptian Christian Copt, says in the past Egyptian Copts immigrated to get a better life in the West, now they leave out of fear for the future in their native land. Another Copt, rights activist Magdi Khalil, says the perception that the war on Iraq was a crusade against a Muslim country has made life even more difficult for Christians in Egypt - a predominantly Muslim country where anti-Western sentiment has reached new heights since the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

America's failure thus far to create a stable, democratic Iraq... has given Western-backed democracy promotion a bad name

Those who were in favour of the Americans overthrowing Saddam Hussein on the grounds that an Arab World minus one dictator would be a better place, feel let down over the way the Bush administration has handled post-war construction.


Hisham Qassem, an Egyptian publisher and rights activist, is one of those who had hoped that removing Saddam Hussein would be the start of a new democratic era in the region. Qassem - who recently met President Bush to receive the National Endowment for Democracy Award - is angry that the Bush administration has failed to understand the region and what it takes to support democracy. He quotes from President Bush's 2003 speech in which he vowed that America would no longer support undemocratic regimes in the Middle East at the expense of democracy and human rights, a speech that was hailed as a potential turning point in American foreign policy towards the Arab world.

"After we saw an American president? admit that for the past 60 years they supported these regimes that have neither brought them security and have not brought us stability here," he says, "it is going to be a very long time before anybody in the region trusts a new American administration."
The result of America's failure thus far to create a stable, democratic Iraq, says another Egyptian writer, Dr Amr Al Choubky of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, is that the life expectancy of authoritarian Arab regimes has been extended by another 50 years.

Iraq has given Western-backed democracy promotion a bad name. Arab leaders have used this to discredit foreign pressure to introduce reforms. Nothing has served them better than the sight of Iraqis fleeing the "new Iraq" to find peace and safety elsewhere. More than 2m Iraqis have fled in fear for their lives to neighbouring Arab countries, mainly Syria and Jordan.

But is there at least one good thing to have come out of the turmoil and bloodshed of the past five years in Iraq? I put the question to Paul Salem of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Beirut. His answer is a qualified 'yes'. If Iraq becomes stable and truly democratic, then it could exert a positive influence over the rest of the region. But given the nature of the political deadlock in the country, and the precarious peace (or rather low-level insurgency) there, one must concede that this remains a very big 'if'.


Magdi Abdelhadi, Arab Affairs Analyst, BBC World Service, has reported widely on the region and presents part of the series How Iraq's War Shaped Our World