In 2003, I went to a market in the Sadr City slums to acquire an Iraqi passport. My purpose was to demonstrate to American officials working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, many of whom confused their position papers written inside the green zone with outside reality, just how insecure Iraqi documents were. It was a real passport and came with a holographic seal to affix to any photograph inserted. Ultimately, Iraq responded to the proliferation of such passports on the black market by cancelling the entire series and issuing a new, redesigned document.
Today, it is not the ordinary Iraqi passports devalued through corruption, but rather Iraq’s diplomatic passports. All countries issue multiple passport types. Tourist and ordinary passports are available to most citizens. Governments also issue service passports to allow government officials to travel on official business. These are different from diplomatic passports, provided both to diplomats and, in many cases, their spouses. In 2001, a time when the United States had approximately 285 million citizens, Slate reported that the State Department had issued 44 million tourist passports, 400,000 official passports, and 80,000 diplomatic passports. Currently, Japan, a country of 125 million, reportedly issues fewer than 1,000 diplomatic passports.
Compare that with Iraq. Iraq today has a population of approximately 44 million people. While there are almost 200 countries in the world, Iraq maintains embassies in only about one-third of them. Yet, today the Iraqi foreign ministry circulates approximately 15,000 diplomatic passports.
Many problems contribute to the proliferation of Iraqi diplomatic passports: Iraqi elites live in a self-dealing bubble of entitlement. They live by a different set of rules and misappropriate privileges for convenience. Why spend an hour in Baghdad traffic to drive from Karrada to Mansour when, with an international zone pass, you can bypass the traffic? Why wait at the same checkpoint as someone without as much wasta? I have written before how Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi distributed land, sometimes worth millions of dollars, to government officials and appointees with a stroke of a pen. That’s quite a perk. The defense that predecessors did it or that such schemes are not illegal are poor excuses, especially for a prime minister never elected by the people but empowered by a mandate for reform.
The passport problem apparently rests both with the endemic corruption of former Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and current Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and with Kadhimi’s refusal to say no to those whose political support he seeks. Diplomatic passports win access to airport lounges, expedited passport control, and an ability to bypass customs, an especially important consideration when taking contraband or cash to Lebanon, Switzerland, or the United Arab Emirates, whose banks teem with ill-gotten Iraqi cash or dollars. To be fair to Iraq, it is not alone in abuse of diplomatic privilege. Both Somalia and Afghanistan also handed out diplomatic passports like free candy. This should be poor company for Iraq, however.
Kadhimi may be an American ally, and Zebari (who currently is in the United States traveling on a diplomatic passport) and Hussein may posture that they are as well. Together, however, they endanger U.S. national security. The FBI found that Saudi diplomatic passport-holders, not all of whom apparently were legitimate diplomats or Saudi officials, aided the Al Qaeda terrorists before the attacks. Nor should anyone take Kadhimi’s reformist drive seriously if he stands aloof in the face of an easy problem to solve.
As Iraq continues to abuse its diplomatic passports, the time is drawing near when the international community simply stops recognizing them. To head this off, it is time for Iraq to collect the thousands of diplomatic and service passports improperly issued, and replace them with a new series, perhaps limited to 500 diplomatic and 3,000 service passports. Like New York City’s 90s-era crackdown on graffiti and squeegee men, this might also have positive reverberations as lawbreakers perceive a new seriousness about rule-of-law and government resolve.
Expert Biography: Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).
