The nation of Iraq, which said goodbye to the last American combat troops only last December, has sent an ambassador to the United States who is a former academic who studied in the West. Dr. Jabir Habib Jabir was appointed ambassador in August 2011 and presented his credentials to President Barack Obama on January 18, 2012. 

 

Born in Baghdad in 1955, Jabir earned a B.S. in Political Science at Baghdad University in 1980 and a PhD in Political Thought from Dundee University in the United Kingdom in 1991, for a thesis entitled, “Modern Islamic Theories of the State, with Special Reference to Rashid Ridha and Ali Abdul-Raziq.” After completing his doctorate and returning to Iraq, Dr. Jabir was appointed lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Baghdad University, where he taught from 1991 to 2005 and rose to the position of dean of the political thoughts department. He was also an associate senior lecturer at the Iraqi Justice Institution from 1998 to 1999. During the years when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, Jabir functioned as an academic, publishing articles and books, supervising graduate students, and occasionally publishing articles in the mainstream press.

 

After the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Hussein, Jabir entered politics and, as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, was elected in 2005 as a member of the newly-formed Iraqi Parliament, where he served on the Constitution Review Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. In March 2010, however, running as a member of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, an officially non-sectarian but heavily Shi’a bloc, Jabir lost his seat in parliament even as the Coalition came in second.

 

He was soon hired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responsible for managing its “Arabic Region” Department from 2010 to December 2011. During that time, he wrote on the problem of endemic corruption in the new Iraqi state.

 

Jabir is married and has three sons, Hanen, Ghofran, and Mustafa.

-Matt Bewig