It tickles my brain in a strange way that the Americans did such a pissweak job of de-nazification after WWII (deliberately so in many ways) and it worked out great for the empire.
But after toppling Saddam, they did a much better job of removing every member of the Ba’ath party from civilian and military power, and it turned into a disaster.
I’ve been turning it over it my head, what was incompetence, what was deliberate, how these two distinct yet similar events played out. Was it simply a matter of the management of empire becoming less competent over time? Would full denazification have caused similar issues in postwar Germany (the experience of the GDR suggests not)?
Very interesting to think about.
The baath party was originally socialist, secular and pan arab. We helped Saddam take it over in Iraq and turn it into what it became but it was still secular and pan-arab when we deposed him so it makes sense the ghouls dismantled it rather than try to coopt it.
Even before they purged their left wing, the Ba'ath party was never socialist.
They were at best Nazbols. They were huge fans of the actual Nazis and explicitly anti-Marx from the very beginning. Their leadership were well versed in Leninist theory, but they were much more interested in using it as a blueprint to build a successful revolutionary movement and disagreed with the goals of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat or building communism. They wanted to use a Leninist approach to seize power, expel the French (hot) then establish an Arab ethnostate (cringe). They translated and distributed a lot of Nazi literature, and before they'd seized power, in the 30s, they wrote to Hitler begging for aid in liberating them from the French. They never wrote to Stalin.
Yeh I think OP fell into the classic Americanism “socialism is when the government owns companies”
I don't think comparing it to fascists in another part and time of the world is that useful.
The way we empowered Isis OTOH...
The Ba'ath party isn't the only one that the US removed from power, banning officials with ties to enemy political parties from assuming office in occupied countries has been standard practice for a while. What's telling is that so many Nazis got exempted, because we prioritized getting West Germany on its feet after the war ended over changing the government's ruling ideology.
I think “what did they want to achieve” is a nebulous thing. Mainly it seems like a mix of cynical MIC sickos and World Bank types out for pure profit contrasted with idiot hick neocons who genuinely thought they could turn this Arabic country they had no idea about into an “America in the Middle East” (made in the neocon image of what America should be of course), which is just absurd. It’s interesting to look at as a Marxist, people like Bremer who thought they could waltz in and rebuild a country through idealism which didn’t match up to the material reality of iraq.
Which isn’t to say there was a “right” way to invade and “rebuild” iraq. They should’ve left it the fuck alone.
