The False Promise of Democracy in Iraq

On a sunny November afternoon, I walked past Gulbenkian Hall, a centre for modern art, which opened in 1962 on al-Tayyaran Square near the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. A philanthropic initiative of Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian businessman, who built a fortune after helping exploit Iraq’s oil resources, supported the construction of the museum with an ochre, latticed façade. Gulbenkian Hall seemed like a metaphor for Iraq: its gates shuttered, its treasures gone, its future uncertain.

The rich trove of early twentieth-century artworks it housed—by the Iraqi master Abdul Qadir al-Rassam and by former Iraqi soldiers of the Ottoman Empire—was relocated to Saddam Hussein’s Centre for the Arts in the 1980s. Soon after the American invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussain on Ap