“TOO SOFT”: AMERICA’S FAILURE TO LEARN FROM GERMANY IN IRAQ
EMMA SALISBURY
APRIL 5, 2024
“By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.” Such a warning from a local CIA station chief would cause most policymakers to reconsider their course of action. And yet, the U.S. authorities in Iraq ignored it, pressing ahead with their plan to remove members of the Baath party from positions of power.
In order to craft a de-Baathification process following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the United States adopted policies that it claimed were based heavily on the denazification policies enacted in the American-occupied zone of West Germany to achieve the same goal. Members of the George W. Bush administration relied heavily on the analogy between the Baath and Nazi regimes and used this as part of their justification for both the invasion itself and the shape of their policies in the aftermath. Despite this, however, the de-Baathification program was badly thought out and badly implemented, proving to be hugely counterproductive for the security and prosperity of post-war Iraq — the United States neither replicated the successes nor avoided the mistakes of denazification.
The reason for this was not that nobody had done the research. On the contrary, the State Department and the CIA had, and their recommendations showed that they had understood the lessons of the German case — that removing every member of the party was unrealistic and would be severely detrimental to the operation of new state institutions. The problem was that they were ignored by the Department of Defense and the White House, who viewed their regional experts as “too soft” to properly remake Iraq. Those who were ultimately responsible for the failures of de-Baathification allowed bureaucratic infighting and overconfidence to undermine the goal of a peaceful and democratic Iraq. While de-Baathification may still have not achieved its goals had the German case been better taken into account, particularly given the myriad ethnic, religious, and political schisms that rocked Iraq following the end of the Baath regime, the Department of Defense missed opportunities to avoid mistakes that had already been made in the 1940s. The lessons from history had been learned — just not by the right people.
https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/too-soft-americas-failure-to-learn-from-germany-to-iraq/
