De-Baath Iraq: Tortured nation needs a political house-cleaning

Manchester Union Leader ^ | April 14, 2003 | Editorial

[billorites]

THE DENAZIFICATION of Germany from 1945 to the mid-1950s remains an effort of questionable effectiveness. To some it went too far, to others not far enough. In Iraq, there can be no question that a deBaathification is necessary, despite the difficulty of the task. Saddam Hussein's Baath Party was modeled on the Nazi Party, though Hussein later turned his regime into a replica of Josef Stalin's. The Baath, or renaissance, Party carries the motto "Unity, Freedom, Socialism." It is less a political party than a quasi-religious social and political movement that demands complete allegiance to the goal of universal, permanent revolution.

"A revolution has no beginning and no end; it is not like a war, and its soldiers must not profit from its spoils. It is something continuous, it is a message to life, and the human being is only the bearer of the message," Hussein once said. "The revolution chooses its enemies, and we say chooses its enemies because some enemies are chosen by it from among the people who run up against its program and who intend to harm it."

An Iraq with an ineffective government and zealous revolutionary partisans running around trying to bring war to the enemy is a scary prospect. In addition, of course, there is the business of bringing justice to the criminals who have brutalized the innocent Iraqi population for decades. The Bush administration needs to see to it that all documents of the Iraqi government and Baath Party are rounded up and secured so we'll know who to arrest and what to charge them with when the time comes.

Even if deNazification didn't work as well as was hoped, deBaathification can go a long way toward weeding out Saddam loyalists and helping clear any future Iraqi government of people who would sabotage it in the name of the Baathist revolution.

[goldstategop]

Excellent editorial. Now we're down to the nuts-and-bolts work in Iraq. Let's hope it succeeds.

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[billorites]

" Now we're down to the nuts-and-bolts work in Iraq. Let's hope it succeeds. "

It will succeed to the degree that we can keep foreign and domestic mischief-makers from interfering with the rebuilding of Iraq's institutions.

I think the military has to do the heavy lifting at the onset of this process.