Arab states standing in their citizens’ queueKaram Nama2026 / 7 / 27My relatively wealthy friend used to sympathise with us: the people of queues. Citizens do not wait for a single service-;- they live inside a chain of queues: a queue for salaries, a queue for electricity, a queue for passports, a queue for hospital beds and an even longer queue for a job that never arrives. Today’s queues produce tomorrow’s queues, until the state itself becomes a giant queue, everyone standing in it, no one reaching the front. States standing behind one another in a long queue called failure, moving one step forward only when their people fall ten steps behind. The Arab queue is not in front of a service window-;- it is in front of a postponed future, as in Iraq today, where citizens queue for electricity, for passports and for the state itself.