Ba'athing beauties

On May 16, 2003, Paul Bremer -- the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US entity that ruled Iraq between the fall of Saddam Hussein and the empowering of the Iraqi interim government -- issued an order banning members of the Saddam's Ba'ath party from serving in the various government ministries, as well as holding posts such as leaders of state-run companies or university professors and department heads.

The result -- de-Ba'athification -- has been a disaster, with one American official in Iraq noting, according to The New Yorker, “We were left dealing with what seemed like the fifth string … Nobody who was left knew anything." Bremer's decision -- followed a week later by another disastrous move: disbanding the Iraqi army -- was done without discussion with or approval by experienced members of the US military and diplomatic core, many of whom could see the foolishness of such policies.

Today, nearly five years later, the Iraqi parliament voted to restore party members, excepting those who committed violent crimes, to government jobs. The law was passed at the behest of the United States, which realized along the way that it had screwed up royally. As the film No End in Sight so clearly pointed out, President Bush and his political leadership made blunder after blunder, refusing to listen to people in the state and defense departments who knew what they were talking about.

While we cannot be positive that things would have gone smoother in Iraq if hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Ba'ath party members weren't thrown out of work and left fuming -- and, in the case of the former, armed -- this latest action by Iraq's government indicates that this might have been the case. Several thousand American soldiers and many thousands of Iraqi citizens have died in the time between the original Bush Administration decision and the current attempt to reverse it. Weren't each of those people owed a competent and well-informed leadership, both in Washington and in Baghdad?