Iraq is still in a state of political turmoil against the rest of the world. There are still innocent citizens, politicians, children, soldiers, and many others dying every day especially since it was declared a war zone a few years back. The current war has killed thousands of people but without a clear reason of why except for the reason given by the Americans. Many activists groups have protested against the war, but in vain, There are various viewpoints to look at this situation.
One of these views is thru the Realist view. A realist is a person who sees a situation most pragmatically. A realist often is a person who sees the truth and believes in idealism. This means they believe that the world can be an ideal place where no wrongdoing has to take place and they want to make everything perfect and in order.
A realist views politics as being separate between domestic and international politics. This means that a realist viewed politics as controllable domestically and internationally in a separate way. However, in the recent Iraq situation, realists are beginning to change their opinion about the political system when they realized that there is a connection between the domestic and international politicians.
This is especially when there was a tension conflict between the US and the Iraqi government as the Iraqi’s were having more of an ethnic conflict, but the US government is interfering to try and make a democratic government for them. Thus, there exists a political conflict between these 2 countries especially with their current political parties that their own citizens don’t support, but are being supported by the US government.
Realism can be viewed using the fundamental or theoretical approach. The fundamental approach highlights that the state acts as the international relaters and there is an unambiguous separation between domestic and international separation of powers in the political system. States can be defined in terms of power especially when they want to protect their national interests and act as unitary-rational actors. The theoretical approach is more towards characterizing the processes thru an international reality way.
There are also several criticisms of political realism. One of them is that it has limited content, whereby it tends to ignore most international interactions that are supposed to be cooperative in nature. Besides that, the assumptions made are also partly valid ones. For example, states are most concerned over many complex issues which do not have much power. These states are not united neither are they behaving universally rationally.
Apart from that, it is also said that realism oversimplifies reality whereby the political situation in the real world is much more complicated and there are much more hidden issues to it than what the realists say. Furthermore, there are also issues of interdependence. This is whereby the states, regardless of is power can shape the entire international system. There are also states that are very much interdependent on each other. In addition, there is also another criticism on being empirical. This focuses more on that the political system is not based on just being pragmatic, there are more underlying issues to it. The political system has been criticized for not being able to predict the world’s major events and processes though research has been done years in advance.