REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Draining Iraq's Baath
Regime change isn't enough. We must make sure the party's over.
With the fall of Baghdad, we've all learned how deeply the Baath Party's terror extended into Iraqi society. No rebuilding of that country will be possible unless the U.S. helps Iraqis de-Baath themselves in the same way that Americans helped the Germans de-Nazify after World War II.
Toward this end, the ironic danger is that the war may have ended too quickly. Saddam Hussein's regime fell so fast that many top Baath officials were able to drop from sight, no doubt hoping to escape accountability and perhaps reappear later as volunteers to help with the "reconstruction." These leaders need to be identified and punished, or at the very least banned from a comeback, if a free Iraq hopes to succeed.
Obviously some common sense has to be applied here. The U.S. can't purge all two million Baath members, most of whom were not Saddam's butchers. Many joined the Party as the only path to advancement, or to personal safety, and some of them can help the U.S. in getting the lights back on quickly. This latter priority probably explains the U.S. military's decision this week to work with Saddam's old oil bureaucracy on restarting the country's refineries and power plants.
Yet we hope someone in the U.S. is looking into the oil ministry's Baath Party records. Everyone knows about the 55 Saddam henchmen on those famous playing cards. But the U.S. also has another 3,000 names, on so-called "black" and "gray" lists, who were the backbone of Saddam's regime. The ranks of the culpable no doubt go much deeper than that, including some 400,000 in the security services. These are the people who manned the torture chambers we are now reading about, and who chopped off ears and tongues on Uday Hussein's orders.
The witnesses to these depredations were Iraqis themselves, and they are now the key to naming names and bringing them to justice. Rather than letting the U.S. military do all of the arresting, the U.S. can help the opposition Iraqi National Congress build up its own police force. Far better than the U.S. Army, these Iraqis know who ran the terror operations or they know who can tell them. The INC has already captured a couple of those on the 55-card list.
Amnesty for Baath leaders would send exactly the wrong message to Iraqis, who are being told to put their faith in democratic institutions and the rule of law. The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland and others have reported that there are already signs of Baathist gangs reorganizing inside Iraq.
If that continues unchallenged, non-Baath members will be reluctant to take the risk of associating with Americans, lest they be punished again once the Yankees go home. Or they will rally to other non-democratic leaders as protection against a Baath revival. And as the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis observes, Iraqis will also see any American refusal to mete out justice not as mercy but as weakness.
Any people who have lived for as long as Iraqis have under dictatorship must go through an extended withdrawal from fear and mistrust. If a civil society and democratic institutions are to develop, Iraqis will need to discover historical truths and a sense of individual responsibility.
That was the lesson of Germany after World War II, and the Nazis ruled in Berlin for a much shorter time (11 years) than Saddam's Baath did in Baghdad (35 years). The countries of Eastern Europe that have come to terms with past crimes have also been more successful than those (like Russia) that have swept them under the rug. To secure a free Iraq, the U.S. must help Iraqis drain the Baath.
