Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about the problem of corruption in Iraq.

My guest is Robert Worth. He's a journalist, an author who spent 14 years at the New York Times,

is the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006,

and later became the Beirut Bureau Chief.

He's the author of the excellent book, A Rage for Order,

The Middle East in Turmoyle, from Terrier Square to ISIS,

describing the discouraging aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring

through the personal stories of some key actors.

Kenneth Pollock from the New York Times captures the spirit of a rage for order when he says that the writing is so beautiful and the storytelling so easy that you won't realize how much you're learning.

And that certainly reflects my experience with the book.

It's a rock that I'd like to focus on primarily today.

Robert, thank you for joining me.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

I loved the book, so I wanted to open with that,

but you were also the author of a fantastic article on Iraq,

published a couple of years ago and then updated just last year

inside the Iraqi kleptocracy. And it's in Iraq that I'd

really like to focus on primarily today. Perhaps you could start, this is an enormously broad question,

but perhaps you could start by giving us some context. What did the Arab Spring look like in

Iraq? The Arab Spring didn't have many look like in Iraq?

The Arab Spring didn't have many direct effects in Iraq because, you know, the Iraqi state had or really kind of collapsed and been rebuilt by that time.

So it didn't have the kind of mass uprising that you saw in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and all

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