DeBaathify, then reBaathify? Bush League's Old Junta Gets Their Boots Back

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May 6th 2004 | BAGHDAD
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2656833

Is Saddam Hussein's old army coming back into the fold?

THE good news for the United States is that Fallujah, the city at the heart of Iraq's insurgency has, for the time being, fallen strikingly quiet. American forces have lifted their three-week siege and withdrawn beyond the town's perimeter. Many of the 100,000 residents who had fled have come home. Americans and Iraqis who were fighting each other have agreed to create a “Fallujah brigade”. Insurgents who hours earlier were shooting at Americans happily accepted American offers of cash, radios and uniforms.

Many Americans—and Iraqis—in Iraq worry that these short-term gains have come at the cost of rehabilitating the old security apparatus that the Americans have travelled so far to crush. But already America's generals are touting Fallujah as a model for pacifying other rebellious towns. “They feel like it's a solution that could work elsewhere,” says the marines' commander, General Jim Conway. “There are obvious advantages to it.” An Iraqi general said that the deal over Fallujah could serve as a precedent for Iraq's other most bloody-minded cities: Ramadi, Kufa, Najaf, Karbala, Basra, Mosul and even for “beloved Baghdad, Iraq's beating heart”.

Most of the rebels, with whom this tentative but so-far-successful accommodation had to be made, served in Saddam Hussein's vast security forces and were disenfranchised overnight a year ago, when America's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, stripped them of their income and jobs. Mr Bremer has now also softened his deBaathification order, which barred senior members of Mr Hussein's regime from power. This week he also ordered that many prisoners be freed.

Not only does this bring back many of Mr Hussein's men into public service. It also authorises a new militia at a time when militias were supposed to disband. In Fallujah, the Americans forgot their previous demands that, as the price for peace, the rebels' heavy weapons should be handed over, along with foreign jihadis and those who had killed and mutilated four American private security men who had been ambushed in the town. Fears that the jihadis' flight would trigger a new wave of bombings were confirmed on May 6th when a suicide car-bomb killed six people in Baghdad, ending several weeks of respite in the capital.


Resign, Rumsfeld May 6th 2004:
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2647493

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