US demands Iraq’s new government repudiate “de-Baathification”

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spelt out the US position during a trip to Iraq in early April. Rumsfeld warned Jaafari that any attempt to remove the Baathists would face opposition from Washington. Last week, in welcoming the announcement of Jaafari’s cabinet, President Bush repeated the demand in equally clear terms.

Bush declared: “One of the real dangers is that as politics takes hold in Iraq whether or not the civilian government will keep intact the military structure what we’re helping them to develop. And our message throughout government to the Iraqis is ‘keep stability, don’t disrupt the training that has gone on...’”

The US demand is highly unpalatable to the main faction in the new government—the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). The UIA is an unstable coalition between various Shiite parties and groups, all of which were suppressed under the Baathists. It includes not only the Shiite fundamentalist Daawa Party and Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), both of which have consistently collaborated with the US forces in Iraq, but supporters of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led an uprising against the occupation last year.

The UIA also includes the formerly CIA-financed Iraqi National Congress (INC) of Ahmed Chalabi, who fell out with the US occupation in large part due to his insistence on a policy of “de-Baathification”—a systematic purge from the Iraqi state of all senior members of Hussein’s party.

As far as all these groupings are concerned, de-Baathification is not a policy that can be put aside easily. Reflecting the ambitions of the Shiite bourgeoisie, they have sought to use the US occupation to supplant the long-established Sunni ruling elite, which has held the main positions of political power since Iraq was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

http://wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/iraq-m04.shtml