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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

3/31/2003

De-Nazifying Iraq
Today's NYT has a good story on how Iraq must be ridded of the Baath Party and taught the ways of democracy after the war, similar to the "de-Nazification" of Germany after World War II.

Last September, a group of 32 Iraqi exiles met in Britain under the auspices of the State Department to compose a document they would title "Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq." The report - it is a full-size book, in a ring binder - was written in English and Arabic and submitted in December to a meeting of Iraqi exile leaders who hoped to form the new government. The exiles never did establish solid relations with the Bush administration, and their report attracted very little attention. Yet it ought to be regarded as one of the crucial documents of the present crisis. Certainly it raises one extremely important point for the future.

The report states flatly, "The practice of politics in Iraq has been dead for 35 years." There have been no political parties apart from the Arab Baath Socialist Party. There have been no organized opposition groups inside the country, no public dissenters, not even a well-known persecuted dissident. Many ordinary people have been implicated in some way with the crimes of the regime. Totalitarianism in Iraq has been, in short, of the darkest hue. Thus the report recommends that, after the fall of the Baathists, Iraq ought to undergo a process similar to the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II - a process of "de-Baathification."

De-Nazification was a vast campaign. The Allies occupied Germany in 1945 and banned the Nazi Party. They made something of an effort to restore property to people who had been pillaged by the dictatorship. Nazi Party members were brought before tribunals, which exonerated some of them, subjected others to criminal prosecutions and banned still others from future public positions.

The de-Nazification campaign imposed reforms on German education and culture. The old Nazi textbooks were withdrawn, and new ones were written. Germany's political culture was given a new shape and texture. To be sure, the success of de-Nazification depended mostly on the active enthusiasm of the Germans themselves, who turned out to be ardent in their desire for change. And the results were, all in all, splendid - even if, 58 years later, the challenges of de-Nazification have not entirely disappeared from the German landscape.

Kanan Makiya, one of the authors of that report, speaks in Nashville on April 2.