>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 4/24/2004 4:15:21 AM >>> > LUCY BANNERMAN > The Herald, April 23 2004 >> Also yesterday, US authorities announced that some senior Iraqi officials purged after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be restored toduties in an overhaul of what had been a keystone policy of the occupation. The review could allow some former members of Saddam's Ba'ath party to join an interim Iraqi government. << I had heard on the BBC that they were going to allow Ba'ath members But this penetrating analysis in the Herald (once again) makes it clear that the occupiers have had to turn a political corner. This was the weakness of the whole strategy of the invasion of Iraq: that the Ba'ath party for all its repressive dictatorial measures including the use of terror (in tens of thousands at the time that the country was just going to fall apart at the end of the first Iraq war) neverthess was imbedded in a complex society. The neocons actually have no chance of building anything like a liberal bourgeois civil society in Iraq dominated by global finance capital, without relying on the whole generation of intelligentsia who cooperated with and saw their line of advance through Ba'ath membership. The unilateral imperialists have come close to throwing out their baby, instead stoking the flames of muslim reaction. They desperately need Ba'ath water. Chris Burford <<<<<>>>>>
perhaps a more 'exoteric' rather than 'esoteric' reading of machiavelli on occupation would have 'better' served so-called straussians (both they and ole' leo have now had their 15 minutes) in bush administration... btw: are bush's ostensible straussians atheists as leo was... michael hoover
