Myth of Progress Grows Mythier

by dday

So I read the news reports of Iraq passing a change to its de-Baathification law with interest. It appeared to come out of nowhere. The Iraqi Parliament was off for a month in December, was no closer to this law before then, but all of a sudden, just when the President is tooling around the Middle East, this law gets passed. Indeed, he was the first to praise it:

Traveling in Manama, Bahrain, President Bush hailed the law as “an important step toward reconciliation.”

“It’s an important sign that the leaders of that country understand that they must work together to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi people,” he said.

Obviously this was something spearheaded by the Shiite majority in the Parliament, otherwise it could not get done this quickly. What I did not know until reading deeper into the reports is that the law was actively opposed by the Sunni minority who you would think would be precisely those to benefit from its implementation. And the prime movers were the Sadrists, not likely to be those interested in unity and reconciliation.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat writes in Arabic that the parliamentarians who criticized the law were drawn from the National Dialogue Council led by ex-Baathist Salih Mutlak, from the Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi (an ex-Baathist), and from two of the three parties that make up the Sunni Arab National Accord Front.

So the parties in parliament that have the strong Baathist legacy did not like the law one little bit. But they are the ones that it was intended to mollify!

Parliament has been unable to get a quorum on several recent occasions, and barely mustered a quorum on Saturday, with 143 members in attendance out of 275. The new law passed with a narrow majority. The vote count was not published anywhere I could find it, but it could have been as low as 72 […]

The Sadrists had demanded that the De-Baathification Commission not be dissolved, but would accept a change in name for it. They had demanded that the Baath Party remain dissolved, and that the high-ranking members of the party be forbidden to enter the new political life or serve as bureaucrats. The Sadrists had also insisted that any high-ranking Baathists presently employed by the new Iraqi government must be fired!

The headlines are all saying that the law permits Baathists back into public life. It seems actually to demand that they be fired or retired on a pension, and any who are employed are excluded from sensitive ministries.

Essentially, this law forces a Baath Party member who wants a job in the government to appear before a judiciary board in public view and announce that they are an ex-Baathist, in a time where Shiite militias and death squads still operate. This is a death sentence that appears to be more about rooting out Baath Party members than anything else.

Critics of the legislation suspect the new body will be manipulated by the same parties that dominated the old committee. They also worry that any Baathists who seek jobs will be targeted by paramilitary groups.

“I wouldn’t come back to my job because of this law,” Sunni parliament member Saleh Mutlak said. “It’s humiliating to the people. You have to condemn yourself, and then be investigated, and then you could be killed [by someone] after going to the committee.”

It’s very easy for Bush defenders and war supporters to conflate the sectarian elements in Iraq, so let’s be clear. This is a law that everyone is saying is designed to help Sunnis that was opposed by most major Sunni groups. This is just the same as the return of the zombie lie that Iranian explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) are being used by insurgents and “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” when Iranians are Shiites, Al Qaeda is Sunni and the “bombs” they described are no more than hand hammered ashtrays that could be made anywhere in the world.

While Republicans spin and lie and distort, Democrats appear unwilling to pick apart the arguments even a little bit, and so in the absence of a response, the lies stand.

Welcome to Iraq policy in 2008.

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