In the Green Zone’s shadow, where the reek of treachery is as heavy as the air in a Baghdad summer, a specter is rising. Nouri al-Maliki—the man who oversaw the intentional dismantling of a nation—seeks a return to the prime minister’s office. This is more than a political calculation. It is a final act of contemptuous defiance in the face of the several hundred thousand Iraqis whose lives have been tossed in the fire of his sectarian megalomania.

To know Maliki means to know the banality of the kleptocrat. Maliki was the ultimate double agent. He pocketed American billions and M1 Abrams tanks with the hand of gratitude, and with the other hand, he handed the sovereignty of Iraq to the mullahs of Tehran. Maliki was the ultimate “trusted proxy” who turned on the Americans the moment the last American boot left the ground in 2011 and used the machinery of the state to turn himself into a personal tool of repression to crush all of his competitors and to purge the Sunnis from the body politic.

Al-Maliki’s years in power will not be remembered for rebuilding the state but for emptying it out. Al-Maliki’s regime has long been accused of presiding over one of the most egregious periods of graft in the country’s modern history. Billions of dollars were siphoned off while the lights were out, the water was rotting, the hospitals were crumbling, and a growing percentage of the population was unemployed.

Investigative journalism and financial analysis, including but not limited to Bloomberg reports, have repeatedly highlighted suspicious funds traceable to Maliki’s relatives and close allies: foreign properties, shell companies, and funds that cannot be accounted for by anyone’s salary. Iraqi citizens have stood by as their country’s wealth was drained into foreign bank accounts, as their children waited in line for gas and jobs that never materialized. This was no corruption; it was pillage never seen in modern history.

These are not only staggering numbers but........

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