Singin' in the Baath Tub

Sam Lanin's Troubadors
Singin' In The Bathtub

30 December 2006: A young man signs the condolences book at the Jordanian Baath Party offices in Amman where party officials were receiving condolences following the execution of Iraq's ousted leader Saddam Hussien

The Syrian-Iraqi Baath party and its Nazi beginnings
(& Commislamist present)

2003
GEORGE KEREVAN

The chances of a lightning-quick war in Iraq evaporated with the unexpected determination and guerrilla tactics of the Baath Party militia. Trapped between a civilian population which viscerally hates them, and the advancing allies, it was predictable the petty bureaucrats and young thugs behind Saddam's totalitarian rule would fight it out. But who are the members of the Baath Party?

In Arabic, baath means renaissance or resurrection. The Baath Arab Socialist Party, to give the organisation its formal title, is the original secular Arab nationalist movement, founded in Damascus in the 1940s to combat Western colonial rule. But since then, the Baath Party has undergone many chameleon-like twists in belief and purpose. Even the young men in Iraq who today claim its discredited banner might be surprised at the party's real origins.

Those beginnings lie thousands of miles to the west, in the leafy streets and pavement cafes of the left bank of the Seine in Paris.

Here, in the 1930s, the two founders of the Baath Party were educated at the Sorbonne University. They were middle-class Arabs from the then French colony of Syria.

Michael Aflaq was a Greek Orthodox Christian and would become the main ideologue of Baathism, preaching freedom from Western colonialism, Arab unity and socialism. And Salah al-Din Bitar, born of a Muslim family in Damascus, would be the practical politician, later becoming prime minister of an independent Syria.

Back home in French Syria, they became teachers by day and political intriguers by night. Early Baathist ideas were strongly fringed with fascism, as you might expect from a group of men whose ideas were formed in France in the turbulent Thirties.

The movement was based on classless racial unity, hence the strong anti-Marxism, and on national socialism in the scientific sense of the word, such as nationalised industry and an autarkic economy serving the needs of the nation. Hence, the antipathy towards Western capitalism.

But the rise of German fascism also played a role. Many in the Arab world saw Hitler as an ally. In 1941, the Arab world was electrified by a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad. At that time, Iraq was nominally independent but Britain maintained a strong military presence. An Arab nationalist by the name of Rashid Ali al-Kailani organised an army coup against the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and requested help from Nazi Germany. In Damascus, then a Vichy French colony, the Baath Party founders immediately organised public demonstrations in support of Rashid Ali.

After the Second World War, the Baathists emerged as the leadership of Arab nationalism for two reasons. First, they were the only force with a coherent ideology. Second, the existing Arab political elites were blamed for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Nor was Islam a competitor. For the Western-educated founders of Baathism, Islam smacked of backwardness. For the nascent Islamic fundamentalists, the Baathists were substituting Arabism for the much wider historic conquests of Muslim civilisation. But it was that pan-Arab nationalism that appealed to discontented Arab youth in the Fifties and Sixties.

Baathism had something else to offer these youths: its tight, disciplined internal organisation which - at any rate, before the party became corrupt - stood in sharp contrast to the ramshackle nature of many Arab civil institutions.

Like the Nazi and Communist parties, the Baath is organised through small cells in a rigid hierarchy. Members are expected to devote their life to the party. In Iraq, would-be members pass through four stages even before becoming a full member: supporter, sympathiser, nominee and trainee. Currently, there are about two million Iraqis in these categories. The system requires passing successfully a series of tests, so full members of Saddam's Baathist organisation are the most hardened and fanatical of his supporters.

With war looming, Saddam has extended this principle with the establishment of Fedayeen Saddam, many of whom have been in action against allied troops. The Fedayeen consists of teenage level members or novices eager to move up in the Baath hierarchy ladder. In this respect, they are very reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.

It is estimated that there are about 40,000 full members of the Baath Party in Iraq. Each is assigned to an autonomous cell. A cell consists of three to five members, only one of whom would have a link to the next level of operation. This limits the ability to penetrate the organisation from without. This structure was born of the original clandestine and illegal life of the Baathists before they came to power.

In 1947, the Baath Party was set up as a single party covering all the Arab counties, under a National Command (actually a pan-national body). In each Arab nation, a Regional Command - ostensibly the leadership of the local Baath Party - was created. The Iraqi branch of the Baath party was established in 1954. In the post-war period, the restored Iraqi monarchy was stoutly pro-Western, but it was overthrown in a military coup in 1958.

The new Iraqi strongman was Abdel Karim Qassim. He disappointed pan-Arabists like the Baath by rejecting joining a United Arab Republic with Syria and Egypt.

As a counterweight to the Baath, Qassim allied with the Iraqi Communist Party (the strongest in the Middle East).

On 8 February, 1963, the Baath Party staged a bloody coup against Qassim, killing thousands of communists. Many believe that the CIA was involved in the coup as a way of destroying communist influence in the region. Ali Saleh Al-Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general, said: "We came to power on a CIA train."

The Baath would not remain in power long. In November of 1963, there was an army counter-coup. But the humiliation of the Arab leaderships in the Seven Day War with Israel in 1967 finally gave the Baathists their moment, and the movement definitively seized power in 1968. The Syrian Baath had already grabbed power in 1963.

Once in power, the nature of Baathism changed. Both in Syria and Iraq, economic and military necessity required an alliance with the Soviet Union, eroding the old anti-communism. The attractions of power resulted in personal corruption.

The late President Hafez al-Assad of Syria was listed by Forbes Magazine as the eighth-richest person in the world, worth $2.3 billion - an impressive accomplishment in a state where the economy is nationalised.

The biggest change was the transformation of the party into the machinery of government. As in the old Soviet Union with the Bolshevik Party, the lines between party, state and military became totally blurred and internal democracy was eroded. That paved the way for dictatorship and the cult of personality in the shape of Saddam Hussein.

Saddam added a twist not seen in Syria, and much against the original spirit of Baathism. Religious sentiment is taking over from the secularism that once defined Iraqi Baathism. Saddam's government has increasingly turned to Islam in its desperate search for legitimacy, playing down the Arab nationalism that once served as its ideology.

What of the Baath Party in other Arab countries? National rivalries mean pan-Arabism is dead and the supra-national Baath Party structure is now an obsolete shell. The Baathists in Palestine and Jordan have been liquidated. In Syria, power is now in the hands of Hafez al-Assad's son, who - despite his anti-Western rhetoric - has purged the old party hierarchy and is quietly moving Syria towards a market economy.

And what of the founding members of the Baath movement? Michael Aflaq became an adviser to Saddam but was soon sidelined as the dictatorship mutated. He died a disappointed man in Baghdad in 1989.

Salah al-Din Bitar broke with the corrupt Syrian regime and went into exile in Paris where, long ago, the Baathist dream was born. There he was assassinated in 1980, most probably by the Syrian secret service.

What are the Baathists doing now, you may ask?
I'll tell you!

Jun 17, 2008 :

Iraq law on Baathists not being implemented

BAGHDAD, June 17 (Reuters) - When the Iraqi parliament passed a law in January aimed at rehiring former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, U.S. President George W. Bush praised it as a step towards national reconciliation.

The Accountability and Justice Law replaced the deBaathification Law, under which tens of thousands of former Baathists, mostly Sunni Arabs, were purged from government and security posts following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

But five months later, implementation of the law is bogged down by infighting between politicians, and the committee once tasked with hunting out Baathists in government has found itself in the odd position of overseeing the process of rehiring them or offering them state pensions.

The government has still not appointed a seven-member panel to replace the deBaathification Committee, whose enthusiastic purge of Baathists from government posts prompted minority Sunni Arabs to accuse them of conducting a witch-hunt.

The Accountability and Justice Law was the first of a series of so-called "benchmark" laws that Washington pressed Iraq's Shi'ite-led government to pass to foster reconciliation. Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam, had complained that the deBaathification programme amounted to collective punishment.

The law is seen as crucial to easing sectarian tensions between Iraq's majority Shi'ite sect and Sunni Arab Muslims that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006.

Ali al-Freji, 43, sits in his office behind the high walls of Saddam's former propaganda headquarters in Baghdad.

Freji is a director-general in the Accountability and Justice Committee, where staff rebuke visitors who still refer to it by its old name, the deBaathification Committee.

Freji, a former opponent of Saddam's rule who says he was jailed in Germany for more than a year for breaking into the Iraqi embassy there, sees himself as a man with a new mission.

"We are doing a professional job by offering former Baathists a new start and stop their suffering," he said.

Aww. My heart bleeds for them. [SNIP]


NOW: This is very very strange. WTF are these documents doing at the Hoover Institution?


Who should get the Baath Party's secret files?

The Hoover Institution, the conservative-leaning think tank located at my alma mater Stanford University, is finding itself in a bit of hot water over some 7 million pages of Baath Party records that both Iraqi and American archivists now say were taken by an "act of pillage" and must be returned to Iraq immediately.

The documents came to Stanford as part of a deal with the Iraq Memory Foundation, a nonprofit group run by Kanan Makiya (above left) -- an Iraqi exile known for his outspoken advocacy for the war in Iraq. Makiya, who stumbled upon the documents during the invasion's nascent period in 2003, maintains the information they contain is too dangerous for general view because they explicitly mention individuals who collaborated with the Hussein dictatorship:

This was not stuff for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have access to," he said in a recent interview. "This stuff was dynamite."

And he knows all the names now, what power he has....

Why are key Iraqi records at Stanford?

A lot worse things have happened in Iraq, but the removal of the Baath Party archives from the country - 7 million pages that undoubtedly document atrocities of the Saddam Hussein regime - is significant.

The documents were seized shortly after the fall of Baghdad by Kanan Makiya, an Iraq-born emigre who teaches at Brandeis University and heads a private group called the Iraq Memory Foundation. Despite protests from the director of Iraq's National Library and Archives, the documents were shipped to the United States in 2006 by Makiya's foundation and in June deposited with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University under a deal struck with Makiya.

'Act of pillage'

The move was criticized in both countries. The Society of American Archivists said seizing and removing the documents was "an act of pillage" prohibited under the laws of war. Iraq's acting minister of culture, Akram H. Hadi, issued a statement in late June expressing the Iraqi government's "absolute rejection" of Makiya's deal. The documents "are part of the national heritage of Iraq," the statement declared, and must be returned to Iraq promptly.

Given the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the millions of refugees, why should anybody care about Iraq's archives? It comes down to whether you care about what happens to Iraq. It's part of its cultural patrimony. It's part of its ability to hold the previous regime accountable.

100 million other pages of Iraqi government documents are still in the hands of the U.S. military after being seized during the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction. The documents now at the Hoover Institution were taken from the Baath Party Regional Command Headquarters in Baghdad and are particularly significant because they almost certainly reveal who secretly collaborated with Saddam - politically explosive information.

How did one man get possession of the entire Baath Party archives?

Makiya is best known not for his foundation or his 1989 book "Republic of Fear," but for his crucial role in persuading Americans - particularly leading journalists - to support a war to overthrow Saddam. "More than any single figure," Dexter Filkins wrote in the New York Times in October, Makiya "made the case for invading because it was the right thing to do." Makiya was an ally of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, and gained fame for a face-to-face meeting with President Bush two months before the U.S.-led invasion during which he said American troops "will be greeted with sweets and flowers."

Shortly after U.S. troops took Baghdad, Makiya and some associates discovered the documents in "a labyrinthine network of basement rooms under the Baath Party's regional headquarters," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Makiya told a Chronicle reporter in January that he received permission from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled Iraq at the time, to move the documents to his parents' home in Baghdad. In 2005, Makiya's foundation reached an agreement with the U.S. military to move the documents to the United States, and they finally arrived at Stanford in mid-June.

Makiya and the Hoover Institution assert that Baghdad is still too unsafe for the archives. They promise to protect and restore the documents, and eventually return them to Iraq.

It's true that chaotic and violent conditions after an invasion can endanger such crucial government documents. But what ought to happen in such circumstances is clear: It's the responsibility of the occupying power to protect and preserve the documents in question (along with the rest of a country's cultural heritage, such as the National Museum in Baghdad, which, of course, was looted as U.S. troops stood by). If the archives required protection, that was the job of the U.S. government and military, not a private individual.

[SNIP]

Kanan Makiya:

In 2003 Jeet Heer wrote in the National Post, quoting Christopher Hitchens, that Makiya is "known to veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth International."

Former Trotskyist Stephen Schwartz responded that he, Makiya and Hitchens were part of a "three-and-a-half international", and that Makiya's "Trotskyist past had nothing whatever to do with his role in advising the Bush administration".

The Fourth International (FI) is a communist international organisation working in opposition to both capitalism and Stalinism. Consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, it has striven for an eventual victory of the working class to bring about socialism.


Kanan Makiya is currently the Sylvia Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University

Soon I had these two lives. I became very active in the anti-war movement, which was burgeoning in the United States. And I was very active in supporting the emerging Palestinian Resistance Movement. I passed through the Nationalist Palestinian groups and I ended up in the Marxist one. All of this happened very rapidly. Within a span of a year I became a Marxist and was attracted to Trotskyist politics. The great influence on me was Emmanuel Farjoun, a member of the Israeli Socialist Organisation, Matzpen. He was also a student at MIT, much older than I. He had enjoyed a socialist training from day dot having grown up in a left socialist kibbutz. It was a revelation for me to meet an Israeli who was critical of his own society. He explained a) basic socialist principles which, of course, were completely new to me, and b) the nature of Israeli society, which was also a revelation for me. We became very, very close friends, almost brothers, for the next twenty-five years. (We fell out over the Iraq war but that's another story. That's sad, very sad.)

OK - I had heard of the "Third Way" AKA "Third Position" AKA "International Third Posistion" but the "Fourth International" was news to me:


ARCHIVES OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL


Middle East Articles from the Fourth International

1946:

"Thus when the “Arab Party,” led by the Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who acted as the mouthpiece of the Nazis among the Arabs, was revived in June 1944, the Arab Stalinists, organised in the National Freedom League, hastened to send the following telegram to the leadership of the party: “The National Freedom League in Palestine congratulates you on your decision to bring your national party into activity, and we believe that this decision will help us all in unifying our efforts in the service of our dear homeland.”

1947:

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. has announced an “Agreement for the Sale of Large Quantities of Crude Oil” to the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey and the Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. for a period of 20 years. One of the terms of the agreement is the “prior investigation by the parties of the possibility of constructing a pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.”

1978: The Terrorist International and Western Europe ~ a must read

2004: From Russia With Terror - Traces KGB roots and control of various Jihad organizations

If the "Third Way" belongs to the Dhimmicrats as it openly does, even citing Blair and Clinton in the WIKI articles embedded above, it stands to reason that this is a legitimate question....does the "Fourth International" belong to the Republicrats?

The Fourth International is also incarnate as "The Internationalist Group" , the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) and the Communist Organization for the Fourth International (COFI)

"The League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), based in the United States, is dedicated to the restoration of authentic Marxism and the political independence of the working class everywhere. Our guiding slogan is Re-create the Fourth International, and we are joined in this task by adherents to the Communist Organization for the Fourth International (COFI) abroad. We publish the political and theoretical magazine Proletarian Revolution."

BTW... the "Third Way" is intimately connected to both American White Power and Black Power groups and racial nationalist movements worldwide.... HELLOOOOOO OBAMA

All I intended to do was show the roots of the Baath party to you.....and look where I ended up! Yes, here is a "First International" and a "Second International"... but I won't subject you them today! Now I know where jihad learned to use millions of different names for the same old crap.

AND NOW... A WORD FROM IKE:

1961: Dwight D Eisenhower