The Ba'ath Redux?
In most Arab states, Saddam’s ‘bloody shirt’ is being waved daily, and used to discredit the hapless but nevertheless democratically elected government in Iraq. It is also used to discredit the whole electoral process and the ideal of real democracy in the Arab World. The argument is simple, primeval: look what happens when big daddy is deposed?

In Jordan, where Saddam was considered a hero (by people who never had to live under his regime) there has been all but official mourning. A cabinet minister appointed by King Abdullah to his government even attended funeral services that turned into a political rally. The Saudi press, the best financed in the third world, hammers daily on how he was abused on his last days, how his execution was blatantly ‘sectarian’.

Saudi-owned Alarabiya TV, however, gets the prize for post-Saddam chutzpah (not exactly a good Arabic word). It reported on its web site today about Saddam's 'efforts' to Islamize the Ba'ath Party. These efforts, the report gushes, started with his converting Michel Aflaq, the Christian Syrian co-founder of the Ba'ath, to Islam. The report claims that Saddam realized that 'the Party' had erred and that he was on a path of reforming it- if only those heathen kaffir Amrican invaders and those rebellious Shi'as had not interfered. The report also claims that even though Saddam was 'disappointed' with the behavior of some Arab leaders, he 'understood' their positions and the pressures they were brought under.  Now isn't that nice and convenient for the Saudi owners and financiers of Alarabiya and for the other Gulf potentates who aided the invasion? It looks like posthumous kiss and make up with Saddam and, more important, with those who are fighting to return Iraq to minority rule and domination. What is taking shape is a regional coalition of corrupt unelected potentates, Wahabi car-bombers, and former Ba'athists.
London-published Azzaman daily, a mouthpiece of the old Sunni Iraqi pan-Arabist ruling elites, has now come out openly against the new political system. Apparently the Sunni elites have lost hope of regaining power through political means and are ready to throw in their lot with the Jihadists. Their only hope now is to coax the American liberators/occupiers to overthrow the regime and replace it with a ‘moderate’ unity government. That would be tantamount to taking a direct hand in the quasi civil war, thus setting the whole southern half of Iraq on fire.

The Iraqi government has clearly and ineptly provided some fuel to its enemies, including all Arab dictators, potentates and absolute monarchs. This unfortunate incident does not change anything in Iraq: it merely provides a pretext to continue the war of terror inside Iraq, and the anti-Shi’a campaign outside Iraq. Executing Saddam under the camera lens was not exactly the Burning of the Reichstag, but it is being used as such by Arab regimes that once glorified the dictator as well as by Arab regimes, especially in the Persian Gulf, that provided at least logistical support for the war that deposed him. This is not just a rehabilitation of Saddam, but is also part of a process of rehabilitating those regimes in the eyes of the Arab (mostly Sunni) masses. Already, Arab media in the Gulf is using quasi-Goebbelsian Ba’athist slogans: calling the Iraqi Shi’as ‘Safawis’, digging deep into history, implying that the regime in Iraq is Iranian rather than Iraqi. The Safawis (Safavis) of course, where rivals of the Ottoman Turks who ruled all Arab lands for several centuries. The implication is simple, tribal, and clear: the Safawis, like most Persians, were Shi'as, the Ottoman Turks were Sunnis- the Arab Sunni minority were favored by the occupying Turks whom they betrayed in World War I. The British, when they conquered Iraq, promptly handed power to the Sunni minority as a reward and because they seemed more accommodating and docile than the suspicious Shi'as (Shiites) and the Kurds. Recent articles in some Saudi media have even reverted to calling Saddam by an old now-discredited title once favored by the Ba’ath: protector of the Arab Eastern Gateway.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum