U.S. hires former Bathh party members

[johnny]

Originally posted by Yorick: Did you guys hear the one about the former KGB agent who ruled an ex-communist superpower?

Vladimir Puto.

[Yorick]

You're puttin' me on?

[Yorick]

Isn't it interesting that Phuket and Bangkok are in the same county?

[promethius9594]

Originally posted by johnny: Then why didn't you hire Hermann Goering for a job so he could feed his family ? Or Adolf Eichman ? Or Rudolph Hess ?

youre joking right? High command nazi war criminals who could do nothing for the nation, vs low level regional party members who have direct connections to this insurgency and might be able to help stop it? and we're talking about monsters vs. anonymous political party members of a fundamentalist regime. more or less all the baath party monsters have been captured and will stand trial.

Originally posted by johnny: You're hiring them to do what ? To take important places in society ? Like being in control of the police ? The army ? the new government perhaps ? well guess what smartypants, that IS putting them back in charge. Unless the US wants to stay in Iraq permanently of course.

the only place the US is going to hire them is for nation building. you know, they'll be in control of cement smoothing, and, um, grocery store bagging, and dangerous to society stuff like cleaning up wreckage from the war... you know, the type of stuff that puts you on the top of the political food chain and turns you into a super villain tyrant.

they need to get jobs, not political or influencial jobs, of course, but REAL jobs where they can earn something of a living doing SOMETHING of benefit for society. If youre an insurectionist, and you know that you're never going to get a job in the nation, which means you and your family starve to death, you'll probably NEVER support the new regime. This is a gesture of good faith to let bygones be bygones and give some people some honest work so they dont feel they have to over throw or die.

sun tsu once said that one should never box an enemy in to where the only option is death. They will become committed to the battle and will fight with everything they have left, inflicting much more damage than if you had left them a retreat. This is that way out. its good strategy to give the lesser baath members a way to survive without having to kill people.

[Dreamer128]

U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004; Page A01

The United States is moving to rehire former members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party and senior Iraqi military officers fired after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, in an effort to undo the damage of its two most controversial policies in Iraq, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, proposed the policy shifts to broaden the strategy to entice the powerful Sunni minority back into the political fold and weaken support for the insurgency in the volatile Sunni Triangle, two of the most persistent challenges for the U.S.-led occupation, the officials say. Both policies are at the heart of national reconciliation, increasingly important as the occupation nears an end.

"Iraq has a highly marginalized Sunni minority, and the more that people of standing can be taken off the pariah list, the more that community will become involved politically," said a senior envoy from a country in the U.S.-led coalition.

The Bush administration is fleshing out details, which it hopes to conclude this week. But the United States, backed by Britain, has decided in principle to, as officials variously characterized it, "fix" or "soften" rigid rules that led to the firing of Iraqis in the Baath Party from top government positions and jobs in such fields as teaching and medicine.

The U.S.-led coalition is already bringing back senior military officers to provide leadership to the fragile new Iraqi army, with more than half a dozen generals from Hussein's military appointed to top jobs in the past week alone, U.S. officials said. Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of Central Command, is working to identify other commanders to bring back, officials added.

"The decisions made a year ago have bedeviled the situation on the ground ever since. Walking back these policies is a triumph of the view in the field over policies originally crafted in Washington," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. Ironically, the two policies were the first actions taken by Bremer, who brought them from Washington, when he arrived in Baghdad to assume leadership of the U.S-led occupation last May.

The administration says neither move is a reversal, but foreign policy experts said it will appear that way in practice to Iraqis. "We are reviewing implementation of policies to look at how to better balance the desire to employ resident expertise with the need for justice," said National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack.

The first move to revise policy on former Baathists will be to reinstate about 11,000 teachers and hundreds of professors fired after Hussein's demise last year, U.S. officials said. "These are many of the people who were treated unfairly by the system. Their Baathist status did not reflect their role in the party," said a senior official in the Coalition Provisional Authority.

By eventually getting thousands of other well-trained Sunnis back in jobs critical to Iraq's revival, the long-term goal is to incorporate Sunnis in post-Hussein Iraq.

"More broadly, [this strategy] is again reaching out to the Sunnis and making them feel part of the process and investing them in the process while also not alienating the rest of Iraq, particularly the Shiites and the Kurds," said a senior administration official familiar with the discussions.

Baathists in the top four levels of the party were fired and the military was dismantled because they were seen as the primary instruments of Hussein's Sunni-dominated government and their continued presence as a threat to the transition, even though vast numbers of Iraqis joined largely to ensure employment or even survival, U.S. officials now concede. They were allowed to appeal for job reinstatement, a process that has proved slow and unwieldy -- and has alienated vast numbers of Sunnis who are the main targets, U.S. officials say.

The administration is considering a range of options, such as a proactive approach that would identify other groups of Sunni professionals to reinstate, or expediting the current process by creating a new commission to adjudicate the appeals. The committee charged with "de-Baathification" is headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite Muslim and controversial politician on the Governing Council.

The administration has not decided how far up the four top layers of the Baath Party to go. But the U.S.-led occupation authority wants only Iraqis who have clean records to be reinstated in government jobs or military positions, U.S. and occupation authority officials said.

The two policies have been under fire inside and outside the administration for months.

"Those policies should never have been put in place because there wasn't enough information on the Baath Party from the outset, and the effort to dismantle the party was ill-conceived and based on ignorance, even though it was clear something had to be done. The CPA went about it willy-nilly," said Timothy Carney, a former U.S. ambassador who served in Iraq in the first months after the occupation. "Dismantling the military was done in haste as well."

The escalating confrontation between U.S. troops and Sunni insurgents around Fallujah over the past month has accelerated the debate within the administration, a senior State Department official said. The administration wants to balance military pressure with political and economic incentives to ensure alienation among Sunnis does not deepen, he said.

The biggest concern and unknown is how Iraq's Shiite majority, historically repressed by the Sunni minority, will react to the two moves, U.S. officials said. As the United States brings back military officers, it is paying special attention to the balance among ethnic and religious factions. The first three former generals reinstated this week included a Sunni Muslim, a Shiite and a Kurd.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[ 04-23-2004, 12:15 PM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[Barry the Sprout]

The problem is that often being in the Baath party was the only way of not getting yourself persecuted in Saddam's Iraq. Many of the members are guilty only of not standing up to be counted like so many others did - something which from my rather comfortable position I find it hard to blame them for.

However this does not change the fact that the core of the Baath party has now taken on its own formal dissolution as a tactic. Before the invasion Saddam is reported, apparently, to have instructed his followers (and there were quite a few sincere ones) to leave the party and then work in the occupation. I recently heard a report from a member of Voices in the Wilderness who'd just returned from Iraq and spent her 9 months there talking to Iraqi workers. She said that not even counting the central government and administration reappointing Baathists many of the old Baathist factory bosses remained in place.

She told one story of a factory where the Baathist foreman had taken the creche away from the workers and given it to a disgraced Baathist friend of his to live in. The workers had to take their children into the factory with them. Ewa (the Voices rep) found that the guy was only legally able to do this as the occupation hasn't rescinded Saddam's old anti-union laws. Saddam made Iraq signitory to quite a few International Trade Union Conventions, but then passed laws to effectively make them irrelevant. The occupation, despite all its talk of hearts and minds, has maintained that legislation and acitvely used it to repress workers there. Thats liberation for you!

[Timber Loftis]

Reading that article, it seems that in the face of continued resistance, the U.S. is trying to figure out how to politically solve the problem (military solution not working so well). Additionally, over time, the country needs to be reintegrating. Marginalizing factions is what causes these problems the world over. Further, the "big fish" Baathists have been mostly rounded up -- we aren't talking about key policy-makers and decision-makers here.

I see nothing wrong with the U.S. trying to be smart about reintegrating Iraq and calming things prior to its exit. Many of us have suggested they do that time and time again. Sounds good to me. If it works it works. Whatever it takes to bring peace and freedom to Iraq.

[johnny]

Timber, during the reign of the Baath party, thousands and thousands of Iraqi's "dissapeared", even the little fish must have known about that. In that light, it's simply not fair to reinstate those people like nothing ever happened. Let them explain to all those mothers, what happened to their missing sons and daughters first. If they can somehow manage to forgive them, which i sincerely doubt, then perhaps they deserve a second chance.

[Ronn_Bman]

According to a story tonight on MSNBC, this move will allow former Baath party members who were school teachers to return to classrooms. Supposedly this move will allow 'normal' party members to return to regular life without allowing those members with blood on their hands to do the same.

[Seraph]

[D]uring the reign of the Baath party, thousands and thousands of Iraqi's "dissapeared", even the little fish must have known about that.

I'm sure the world renown Iraqi press was just jumping at the chance to report things like that, and I'm sure that familes of those who dissapeared had nothing to fear if they made a big deal, right? I'm not sure you appreciate how hard it can be for information to move if the government is activly opposing it.