{"id":14326,"date":"2008-01-23T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2008-01-23T15:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14326.html"},"modified":"2008-01-23T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2008-01-23T15:00:11","slug":"when-political-progress-in-iraq-looks-more-like-political-regress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/when-political-progress-in-iraq-looks-more-like-political-regress\/","title":{"rendered":"When political ‘progress’ in Iraq looks more like political ‘regress’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last 10 or so days, supporters of the administration’s Iraq policy have insisted, repeatedly, that Iraq’s new “de-Baathification” law is proof of long-awaited political progress.<\/p>\n

John McCain, who’s been wrong about every aspect of the war for six years, said the law is evidence that “we’re succeeding politically<\/a>.” Fred Kagan, an architect of the \u201csurge\u201d strategy, said the law is the beginning of a new era of \u201ccivil rights legislation<\/a>\u201d in Iraq. Over the weekend, Kagan, Jack Keane, and Michael O\u2019Hanlon trumpeted the legislation as a first step in the surge\u2019s \u201cremarkable<\/a>\u201d success. Condoleezza Rice, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have all made similar comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like most Iraq-related rhetoric from Bush and his allies, all of this seemed wildly off base. As Josh Marshall noted<\/a>, it’s been “more or less an open secret that the law is a disappointment and even a sham,” because instead of a “de-Baathification” measure, the law actually points to “a new and more thorough purge<\/i> of ex-Baathists rather than their reintegration into the state and military bureaucracy.”<\/p>\n

Of course, that’s the way it seemed. Today, the WaPo has a very compelling front-page item<\/a> explaining that skepticism about the “de-Baathification” law is warranted, while claims from McCain, the Bush gang, and their ideological chorts are simply wrong.<\/p>\n

Maj. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, a former official in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, became the commander of the Iraqi National Police despite a 2003 law barring the party from government.<\/p>\n

But now, under new legislation promoted as way to return former Baathists to public life, the 56-year-old and thousands like him could be forced out of jobs they have been allowed to hold, according to Iraqi lawmakers and the government agency that oversees ex-Baathists.<\/p>\n

“This new law is very confusing,” Awadi said. “I don’t really know what it means for me.”<\/p>\n

He is not alone. More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, it’s the opposite of all conservative claims<\/i> about the legislation, but the broader point is certainly correct: the law held up as progress is actually a step backwards.
\n<\/p>\n

The new law was supposed to ease the homeward passage of former Baathists such as Muhammed Kareem.<\/p>\n

After 35 years as a civil servant in the Oil Ministry, Kareem fled his home in Basra after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Four fellow Baathists from the ministry in Basra had turned up dead. Searching for him, militiamen had ransacked Kareem’s house.<\/p>\n

Kareem, 53, and his family moved to Amman, Jordan, where they live in a sparsely furnished basement apartment. He has one abiding wish: to return to Iraq. But sitting at his kitchen table last week, flipping through a draft of the law, he was despondent.<\/p>\n

“This is a bomb on the road of reconciliation,” said Kareem, a former director general in the ministry. “This law does not bring anything new. This does not serve national reconciliation that all Iraqis are hoping for. On the contrary, it envisions hostility, hatred, discrimination and sectarian strife.”<\/p>\n

Kareem, along with other Baathists who were purged from their jobs after the invasion, argues that the law typifies the animosity that Iraq’s Shiite-led government has for the bureaucrats of Hussein’s regime. They say the climate is nowhere near safe enough for them to identify themselves to the government as former Baathists.<\/p>\n

Kareem, who was a senior Baath Party member, said the new law does grant him the right to a pension, which would greatly benefit his family. He has not had a steady salary in five years, and has been living off the charity of friends and relatives, but said he would not attempt to claim the pension.<\/p>\n

“This law is bait,” he said. “I have to go back to Basra and apply for the pension through several measures. If I get killed, nobody will know who did it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Something to consider the next time John McCain boasts that “we’re succeeding politically.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last 10 or so days, supporters of the administration’s Iraq policy have insisted, repeatedly, that Iraq’s new “de-Baathification” law is proof of long-awaited political progress. John McCain, who’s been wrong about every aspect of the war for six years, said the law is evidence that “we’re succeeding politically.” Fred Kagan, an architect of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}