Back in the 'hood again
Playing ball with Saddam's former buddies
BAGHDAD--A funny thing happened on the way toward Iraqi sovereignty. Last week, former Iraqi Army officers, led by a Republican Guard general, strode through Fallujah's streets in their old olive-green uniforms and shook hands with a U.S. Marine commander, sealing a pact to retake control of the city's armed forces. And Iraqi Minister of Defense Ali Allawi watched it all, aghast. "Iraq is too fragile . . . to overcome the legitimate fears of people that all those creeps are coming back into power," he says.
The Baathists are back. After a year of relentlessly purging members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party from top positions in the government and Army, the U.S.-led coalition has concluded that it needs their help. The only way it could stop the fighting in Fallujah was by forming a brigade led by a Saddam-era general (though the former Republican Guard general was later replaced by a general with a more acceptable pedigree). At the same time, occupation chief Paul Bremer ordered a faster appeals process for discharged Baathist teachers, Army officers, and other professionals in an effort to strengthen institutions and give disenfranchised Sunnis a stake in the new Iraq. It also comes in response to the disappointing performance of Iraqi security forces in early April, when 40 percent of the newly formed police and civil defense forces refused to fight with coalition troops.
The angry class. The de-Baathification policy, one of the first announced by Bremer last year, left an estimated 400,000Iraqis from the top three tiers of the Baath Party out of work. Many criticized the policy at the time, saying that it not only unfairly punished some whose jobs required party membership but also created a large class of people who were angry and out of work. "We had so much institutional knowledge walk out the door," says a senior Coalition Provisional Authority official who works with the security forces. "They knew where all the money was, where all the bodies were buried, so to speak--and they had no incentive to be cooperative with us afterwards." On the day he fired a group of Iraqi police officers, the official recalled, one officer said: "What can we do now? . . . You oblige us to become terrorists."
The new embrace of the Baathists, unsurprisingly, is not going down well in largely Shiite southern Iraq. Iraqis there see the rehiring as an alarming precedent. "Those are the people responsible for the mass graves and all the horrible attacks in the south. They are the same slogans, the same methods, the same uniforms," says Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Governing Council representative from a Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Bremer's defensive response at a Governing Council meeting last week was paraphrased by a source as, "You wanted an Iraqi solution, but you couldn't come up with one. So we came up with one."
Take the case of a former general who was in charge of air defenses. In the regime's last days, he drove around with antiaircraft rockets in his car, trying to shoot down American Apache helicopters. Now, the Americans are looking for him. But not to throw him in jail; they want him back in uniform, part of the new Iraqi Army. "The Americans are finally realizing that only Iraqis know how to deal with Iraqis," he says. There may be Governing Council figures able to lead Iraq, he says, adding with a grin, "But Saddam? Saddam is best."
This story appears in the May 17, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
