The Baath is Back

The recent news that thirty-five Iraqi officials have been arrested for allegedly plotting a Baathist coup, serves as a necessary reminder of the real game on the ground in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, after all, did not spring fully formed as a dictator from the mind of the American electorate; he was coming from somewhere, after all, and regardless of the veracity of the story about attempts to reinstate the now-banned Baathist party or its reincarnation, Al Awda, it is useful to recall that in other times, in other contexts, Saddam was more than the second-scariest gremlin in the American imagination.

It is easy to forget that Saddam was more than a shadowy dictator to the East - he was a Baathist, and came to political prominence in the bosom of a party that combined left-leaning, even socialist, Western political philosophies with Arab nationalism - a tenuous intellectual fusion that opposed colonialism even as it owed ideological debts to its oppressors. As the de facto strongman behind the Iraqi branch of the party, Saddam was responsible for promoting this sense of nationalism, both Pan-Arab and purely Iraqi, in a country whose borders had been drawn haphazardly by the English without any regard to ethnic or religious divisions. His approach - in keeping with the fairly standard tradition of the Darwinian "military legitimacy" of the Middle East - was to enforce unity and stability at the cost of individuality. His achievements were twofold: he managed to maintain control of Iraq for decades, even as the years preceding his rule were marked by bloody coups and factional infighting, and thus stave off civil war. So too did he manage to perpetrate some of the most atrocious violations of human rights in recent memory.

The question of a final judgement on an authoritarian leader is a difficult one. Caesar Augustus is widely remembered as one of history's greatest rulers; Stalin will likely receive no such lauds. But as doubts, intrigue, suspicion, and all the other progenies of non-authoritarian Middle Eastern governments come into play, as questions are raised about the degree to which this plot was little more than an attempt to remove ex-Baathists from government for purely political purposes , we are inevitably reminded of the situation that led to the rise of Saddam: infighting in halls of power, dangerous liaisons, surreptitious removals of power, tensions between Shi'ite and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, coups, bombings, and bloodshed. The theocratic element, which no doubt owes something to increasing Shi'ite influence from a hawk-eyed Iran, complicates matters further this time around.

What happens next is uncertain. But the issues these latest arrests have brought up should be brought to the forefront of the national discussion on Iraq. The issues say much about the inherent instability of a country - the term nation almost seems inappropriate - as fraught with factionalism as this one. How did a party that began as an anti-colonialist movement end up being banned by the army of a western invader? And how, in the absence of a party successful, if nothing else, than in maintaining order and a sense of Iraqi nationalism, can Iraq avoid this kind of threatening machinations?

One almost wonders if we should mind Bismarck's apocryphal aphorism about the dirty necessities of government: "Laws are like sausages; it's better when you don't know how they're made."