U.S. Foreign Policy: A Civil War Here, a Civil War There

This is clear to see for the thinking person. Let us examine the first example of President George W. Bush and de-Baathification. Shortly after the fall of the Saddam regime, via L. Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), in one of his first things President Bush introduced was the de-Baathification program to remove members of the Ba’ath Party from their positions of authority and to ban them from future employment in government. They [the Bush Administration] selected Ahmed Chalabi to head of the De-Baathification Committee, which had the goals of preventing the Baath from regaining power, avoiding and retribution against Baathists and isolating the majority of Baathists from their party leaders.

This process of de-Baathification was supported via the forfeiture and seizure of all party assets and property, which was to be held in trust by the CPA for the use and benefit of the Iraqi people, albeit there were no real Iraqi citizens involved, just an Iraqi de-Baathification Council (IDC), composed entirely of Iraqi nationals formerly living in the U.S. and Europe mainly.

From the beginning de-Baathification was a very incongruent and f##ked up process for lack of a better phrase. Not only did it not achieve it aims, it also polarized Iraqi politics and worse, made the Iraqi military and government even more unstable after U.S. military intervention and occupation. Then it brought in al-Qaeda, to a region where it had never existed before as well as driving a wedge between Sunni, Shia and even Kurds in Iraq. And after all of this, Barack Obama came in, and when you thought his promise to end the war would make things much better, they actually followed the GWB foreign policy playbook and made things even worse.

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