Commentary: Iraq's Abadi has historic opportunity despite political maze

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi maybe in front of a historic opportunity to overcome wide spread corruption in the country that struggles to cope with financial and security challenges.

In late 2014, the Iraqi cabinet approved a preliminary draft of 2015 budget of about 106 billion U.S. dollars, with a deficit of about 19 billion, based on an average oil price of 60 dollars a barrel.

However, as oil sales account for nearly 95 percent of Iraq's government revenues, Baghdad should prepare itself to deal with formidable difficulties when the oil price in the world markets could further decline to as low as 40 dollars a barrel or even 30 in the near future.

Right now, the government and the various political blocs in the parliament are in tough talks to find reasonable ways to reduce the deficit of the 2015 budget.

While the size of the new budget is shrinking due to the oil price slump, the volume of the deficit is one the rise. It forced the authorities to look for ways to decrease the deficit, including cutting the government expenditures and fighting corruption.

Additionally, Iraq is the world's number one battleground against the extremist Islamic State (IS) militant group, which seized large parts of Iraq and the neighboring Syria.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi came in office in September. He has many difficult tasks to deal with, like forming a more inclusive central government, adopting more social reforms, and readying the country's security forces to battle extremist militants.

Abadi did try to restructure the security forces. He understood that corruption was the main reason to explain their collapse in the face of the IS advance in June. The Iraqi leader also tried to promote reconciliation between various ethnic groups in the country, the Shiites, the Kurds and Sunnis.

It is not hard to know that fighting IS militants requires a rather powerful economy to finance the war machine. Yet Iraq is fast losing more money when its traditional key revenues sources are withering, and no new supplements have emerged.

Therefore, here are the questions. Is Abadi capable of effectively pursuing anti-corruption measures to retrieve the waste of billions of dollars from the pockets of the corrupt officials and generals?

In most cases, the corrupt officials are well protected by some powerful and leading political parties, and are connected to networks of local and international companies and organizations.

In Iraq's political maze, Abadi's anti-corruption mission is complicated and the man must face tough choices, including facing his influential corrupts from his own Shiite political bloc.

In mid-December, Abadi vowed to continue root out corruption in the country despite the threat of being assassinated.

"I am moving forward with reforms. Campaigns were launched to topple me, but I will not back off even if I get assassinated," Abadi said.

However, in Iraq much cry and little wool, as observers and people have a lot of hope that Abadi could bring back their country and fight back the IS extremist militants. But they see his reforms are slow and have no tangible impacts on the ground.

He needs to work harder in his anti-corruption efforts and diversification of income sources, including maximizing the state revenue from non-oil sectors.

All in all, Abadi has been in nearly every way different a leader than his predecessor Maliki. What he needs is to catch the opportunity to bring about good governance and defeat terrorism as long as he got broad base of support, both internally and internationally. Endit