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I Hated Josh Hawley Before It Was Coup
How To Handle The De-Ba’athification of the USA
Remember Iraq? Man, what a mess that was. I recall a moment that stood out, just a few months into our invasion of Iraq. I was in a bookstore in New York, looking at travel books. I saw Fodor’s Guide to Iraq. I picked it up and read part of it. It was an anachronism. It was about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The book spoke to how the Ba’ath Party, Saddam Hussein’s party, was the controlling force in Iraq, and how it was a mixture of Naziesque totalitarian ideology and cult of personality built around Saddam and his sons. It warned that even if you just wanted to run a bath, you had to be a member of the Ba’ath party. That meant that everyone in the party paid lip service to the party, but not all of them were hardcore lunatics, though plenty of them were.
When the US and its allies defeated Saddam Hussein and his army, it was left with rebuilding the nation. Taking a page from WW2, it decided to de-Ba’athify Iraq, barring all party members from involvement in the new government. This caused more problems than it solved.
It meant that the new government wasn’t just going to be mostly from other religious and ethnic groups than the formerly ruling Sunni elites because all the sort of people who would have served in government were…
