Ali al-Zaidi will travel to Washington on Monday with an official delegation, and the agenda is already laid out: oil and gas deals, deeper strategic ties with the United States, and more talk of economic, trade and investment cooperation. The language is polished. The machinery underneath is not. Iraq’s government spokesperson Haider al-Aboudi said the agreements will include several memorandums of understanding in the oil and gas sector as Iraq prepares to bring in various U.S. companies that will provide momentum to increase oil production capacity.
The State Deals, People Absorb the Shock
The planned visit puts the state’s priorities in plain view. Iraq’s state news agency, citing al-Aboudi, said the oil and gas agreements would also seek to create alternative export outlets to reduce Iraq’s exposure to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Iraq, like other Gulf oil producers, has suffered a drop in oil revenue due to the effective closure of the vital shipping route during the U.S.-Iran war. That’s the kind of sentence governments use when they want to sound technical while ordinary people live with the consequences of wars and rivalries they didn’t choose.
Al-Aboudi said strengthening Iraq’s armed forces would also be among the issues discussed in Washington. So the same visit that promises investment and production capacity also folds in military strengthening. The state gets its contracts, its security language, its strategic alignment. Everyone else gets the bill, and the risk.
Between Washington and Tehran, the Public Pays
Iraq has been trying to balance its ties with neighbouring Iran and the U.S. as military escalation between the two rivals continues. That balancing act has become a permanent feature of governance: one capital leaning on another, then the other way around, while the population sits inside the pressure zone. Relations between Iraq and the U.S. have at times been strained over the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, Baghdad's ties with Iran, and U.S. pressure on Iraq to curb the influence of Iran-backed armed groups.
That’s the state system in miniature. Foreign troops, rival patrons, armed groups tied to outside power, and a government trying to keep its footing by negotiating with all of them. The people of Iraq are not the ones signing memorandums of understanding. They’re the ones living under the consequences of those understandings.
The visit also comes after Ali al-Zaidi was nominated for the premiership in April this year, and he received congratulations from U.S. President Donald Trump, who said he hoped for closer cooperation between Baghdad and Washington. The congratulations were diplomatic, of course. They always are. But they also make the hierarchy clear enough: a new Iraqi leader gets his nod from Washington, and the relationship is framed as cooperation, not dependency.
Oil, Arms, and the Old Script
The base article presents the trip as a push for economic, trade and investment cooperation. It also says the agreements will bring in U.S. companies and increase oil production capacity. That’s the familiar script: extract more, export more, secure the routes, strengthen the armed forces, and call it development. The state calls it strategy. The public gets told it’s progress.
What’s missing from the official language is anyone outside the state and corporate circle. No workers, no local communities, no independent public voice. Just a delegation, a spokesperson, U.S. companies, armed forces, and rival governments trying to manage a region through contracts and coercion. The whole arrangement depends on institutions that claim to represent everyone while answering upward, to power, capital, and foreign patrons.
Ali al-Zaidi’s Washington trip is being sold as a step toward cooperation. In practice, it reads like another round of state bargaining over oil, force, and access, with ordinary Iraqis left to live inside the fallout.