The Guardian headlines Iraq opens door to Saddam’s followers. The NYT says Iraq Eases Curb on Ex-Officials of Baath Party and McClatchey assures us that Iraq’s parliament lets Baathists back into government.
A great victory for Bush who, himself responsible for the ill-conveived de-Baathification enacted under Paul Bremer, announced a year ago:
[T]o allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, …
Not so!
The new law will do just the opposite. As Juan Cole questions:
If the new law was good for ex-Baathists, then the ex-Baathists in parliament will have voted for it and praised it, right? And likely the Sadrists (hard line anti-Baath Shiites) and Kurds would be a little upset.
Instead, parliament’s version of this law was spearheaded by Sadrists, and the ex-Baathists in parliament criticized it.
Somehow that little drawback suggests to me that the law is not actually, as written, likely to be good for sectarian reconciliation.
Indeed the new law, which still needs approval by the Iraqi President and Vice Presidents, includes only marginal positive points:
Lami, [spokesman for the current de-Baathification commission,] estimated that 3,500 people from the third-highest Baathist rank, or Shubah members, would be allowed to apply for pension payments but would still be kept from their jobs. About 13,000 people from the fourth rank, known as Firqa members, would be eligible to return, but he expected that many would not.
"Most of them are either working outside the country and they don’t want to go back to Iraq, or they’re afraid somebody will take revenge on them …"
…
The new measure would also prohibit Baathists who worked in Hussein’s security services from returning to jobs, as well as ban their return to some of the most influential agencies, such as the Interior Ministry, Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry …
The new law is allowing some Baathist to receive pensions and a few may get government jobs that likely don’t fit their expertise.
But it is even worse. The law eliminates ex-Baathists who currently are in government functions from their jobs:
The new measure could lead to a new purge of members of the current Iraqi government, Lami said, including about 7,000 officers in the Interior Ministry. Even influential Iraqi security force officials who used to be Baathists could face removal.
"The commander of the Baghdad security plan and his assistants, according to the new law, they should retire," he said.
Unreported in the news accounts is how this law will effect the secret police force, build by the CIA out of Saddam’s old security personal and still under its control. Could this have been the objective of the law?
The new law might even lead to elimination the opposition in the Iraqi parliament. As Cole translates from an Arab paper:
The law contains an article forbidding the Baath Party "from returning to power ideologically, administratively, politically or in practice, and under any other name."
…
[T]his objectionable passage seems to make it possible for the Sadrists, e.g., to keep people like Iyad Allawi from ever again enjoying high office. His secular, nationalist Iraqi National Dialogue party could easily just be branded too close to the original Baath Party and dissolved, and he could be excluded from high office by this new provision.
So while the "western" media hails the new law as success for one of Bush’s benchmarks, it is actually the opposite.
It will deepen resentment in Iraq and reinforce the (ex-)Baathist part of the resistance.