Gulf Ba’athists Without Saddam: Rehabilitation in Exile. The JFK Analogy
Some Gulf states seem to have decided that Iraqi Ba’athists were not a bad lot after all- to judge by the headlines of Persian Gulf newspapers, and the some of the columns:
They were only misled by Saddam into attacking other Arab states!
Most former leading Ba’athists are not really that bad!
Anyway, most Ba’athists in the early days were Shi’as according to Saddam, so they bear at least some of the blame (for their own troubles)!
At least the Ba’athist leaders were Sunni, while the current leadership is largely Shi’a and suspect of loyalty to the mullahs in Iran (shades of JFK and the Pope, but on a much more primitive and tribal level).
Even the top military and intelligence leaders who carried out the use of chemicals and poison gas, killing thousands in Kurdistan and many more thousands of Iranians, are being rehabilitated, the very same who invaded Iraq’s neighbors to the East and South. Of course when they gassed the Kurds and the Iranians in the 1980s they were cheered in a couple of Gulf states, so maybe nothing has changed after all. Even those who knocked on doors at dawn and dragged people to places where death would be considered a reprieve are being welcomed among some Persian Gulf oligarchies. They have found new masters among their former victims, who were once their enablers and suppliers during the 1980s.
Some are going further: a shy but clear rehabilitation of Saddam is in progress in the Saudi media. The rehabilitation of Saddam and the old party is one way to face the new order in Iraq, with its Shi’a-Kurd majority. It is a process that is done gradually because some still carry bitter memories and scars. There are now opinion pieces in the Saudi press that assert that Saddam was “tried, held, treated, sentenced, and executed in a savage sectarian way….”. Some are still saying that his execution was “done by Iranian orders, in order to avenge the war of the 1980s…” Three years of a transparent trial, with a battery of Iraqi and foreign lawyers, as well as open trial covered by the media. He was not tried secretly then beheaded in a public square at a Friday noon- as they do over there. He was not held without trial, nor without recourse to appeal, as many are being held in the dungeons and cellars of the Middle East, some of them for years.
“Saddam : I was against the attack on Kuwait, but there was no other solution……Shi’as were a majority of the Ba’ath Party in 1963…..” Asharq Alawsat
A majority in 1963: if true, it means that something funny happened to them on the way to power.
The Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat and some in other Gulf newspapers, have become a haven for defeated Iraqi Ba’athist generals, henchmen, and former media propagandists. Some of these as well as former secret police agents are reported by the Bahrain opposition, and corroborated by Western media, have been recruited and naturalized by rulers of the small Persian Gulf island state in order to offset the size of its native Shi’a population. These former Ba’ath thugs now serve a new master, a new oligarchy, holding security jobs denied the original peoples of that small state. Others of these former Ba’athists have gone back to rewriting their old briefs, but for gullible Gulf readers instead of party leaders. This piece is one of a periodic opinion written by a former henchman of Saddam, his head of Military Intelligence. He fled Iraq after he realized that the jig was up.
He, like others, has found a haven and a pulpit in the petro-media of the very same people they tried to destroy. He is now expounding on his theories about Gulf security and how to deal with it: they are the very same silly ideas pushed by the Ba’ath regime for 35 years. Surely, if the “right” regime ever regains power Baghdad, former general Samarrai will be back in service. But it is a long shot.Interesting to see how all this evolves.
Cheers
mhg
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