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Us rehires baath party former military { April 22 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32562-2004Apr21.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32562-2004Apr21.html
U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004; Page A01
The United States is moving to rehire former members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party and senior Iraqi military officers fired after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, in an effort to undo the damage of its two most controversial policies in Iraq, according to U.S. officials.
The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, proposed the policy shifts to broaden the strategy to entice the powerful Sunni minority back into the political fold and weaken support for the insurgency in the volatile Sunni Triangle, two of the most persistent challenges for the U.S.-led occupation, the officials say. Both policies are at the heart of national reconciliation, increasingly important as the occupation nears an end.
"Iraq has a highly marginalized Sunni minority, and the more that people of standing can be taken off the pariah list, the more that community will become involved politically," said a senior envoy from a country in the U.S.-led coalition.
The Bush administration is fleshing out details, which it hopes to conclude this week. But the United States, backed by Britain, has decided in principle to, as officials variously characterized it, "fix" or "soften" rigid rules that led to the firing of Iraqis in the Baath Party from top government positions and jobs in such fields as teaching and medicine.
The U.S.-led coalition is already bringing back senior military officers to provide leadership to the fragile new Iraqi army, with more than half a dozen generals from Hussein's military appointed to top jobs in the past week alone, U.S. officials said. Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of Central Command, is working to identify other commanders to bring back, officials added.
"The decisions made a year ago have bedeviled the situation on the ground ever since. Walking back these policies is a triumph of the view in the field over policies originally crafted in Washington," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. Ironically, the two policies were the first actions taken by Bremer, who brought them from Washington, when he arrived in Baghdad to assume leadership of the U.S-led occupation last May.
The administration says neither move is a reversal, but foreign policy experts said it will appear that way in practice to Iraqis. "We are reviewing implementation of policies to look at how to better balance the desire to employ resident expertise with the need for justice," said National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack.
The first move to revise policy on former Baathists will be to reinstate about 11,000 teachers and hundreds of professors fired after Hussein's demise last year, U.S. officials said. "These are many of the people who were treated unfairly by the system. Their Baathist status did not reflect their role in the party," said a senior official in the Coalition Provisional Authority.
By eventually getting thousands of other well-trained Sunnis back in jobs critical to Iraq's revival, the long-term goal is to incorporate Sunnis in post-Hussein Iraq.
"More broadly, [this strategy] is again reaching out to the Sunnis and making them feel part of the process and investing them in the process while also not alienating the rest of Iraq, particularly the Shiites and the Kurds," said a senior administration official familiar with the discussions.
Baathists in the top four levels of the party were fired and the military was dismantled because they were seen as the primary instruments of Hussein's Sunni-dominated government and their continued presence as a threat to the transition, even though vast numbers of Iraqis joined largely to ensure employment or even survival, U.S. officials now concede. They were allowed to appeal for job reinstatement, a process that has proved slow and unwieldy -- and has alienated vast numbers of Sunnis who are the main targets, U.S. officials say.
The administration is considering a range of options, such as a proactive approach that would identify other groups of Sunni professionals to reinstate, or expediting the current process by creating a new commission to adjudicate the appeals. The committee charged with "de-Baathification" is headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite Muslim and controversial politician on the Governing Council.
The administration has not decided how far up the four top layers of the Baath Party to go. But the U.S.-led occupation authority wants only Iraqis who have clean records to be reinstated in government jobs or military positions, U.S. and occupation authority officials said.
The two policies have been under fire inside and outside the administration for months.
"Those policies should never have been put in place because there wasn't enough information on the Baath Party from the outset, and the effort to dismantle the party was ill-conceived and based on ignorance, even though it was clear something had to be done. The CPA went about it willy-nilly," said Timothy Carney, a former U.S. ambassador who served in Iraq in the first months after the occupation. "Dismantling the military was done in haste as well."
The escalating confrontation between U.S. troops and Sunni insurgents around Fallujah over the past month has accelerated the debate within the administration, a senior State Department official said. The administration wants to balance military pressure with political and economic incentives to ensure alienation among Sunnis does not deepen, he said.
The biggest concern and unknown is how Iraq's Shiite majority, historically repressed by the Sunni minority, will react to the two moves, U.S. officials said. As the United States brings back military officers, it is paying special attention to the balance among ethnic and religious factions. The first three former generals reinstated this week included a Sunni Muslim, a Shiite and a Kurd.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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