Bringing Back the Baathists

My, this is certainly an interesting piece of news.

Allawi Presses Effort to Bring Back Baathists
By Edward Wong and Erik Eckholm, New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 12 - Seeking to speed the return of senior officials of the former ruling Baath Party into the government, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has tried to dismantle a powerful independent commission that was established after the American invasion to keep such people from power.

It is the most aggressive move yet by Dr. Allawi, a former Baathist who fell out of favor with Saddam Hussein, to bring former ranking party members into his fold. Dr. Allawi says the readmissions will dampen an increasingly lethal insurgency by co-opting disenfranchised Sunni Muslim Baathists. The expertise of high officials from the old Iraqi security forces is also urgently needed to help combat the guerrillas, he contends.

And with general elections scheduled for January, Dr. Allawi and American officials are scrambling for ways to bring reluctant Sunnis into the political process.

(Full story)

Allawi's efforts run completely counter to the Bush Administration's previous decision to summarily expel all Baathists from government positions, which I criticized way back in December 2003:

(Adenauer's) decision to allow Nazis to occupy high offices, as long as they were repentant for their past ties, is in direct contrast to Bush's banning of all Baath party members from Iraq government jobs. Surely more than a few of these bureaucrats were Baathists in name only, and joined the party more out of expedience than political belief. The fate of the Kurds and Shiites under Saddam's regime clearly showed it was best to stay on the dictator's good side, even if that meant as little as officially joining a political party. If this also meant gainful government employment, the decision to join the party was even easier. With the U.S. taking over control of Iraq, the best way to win the loyalty of Baathists would have been to keep them in their jobs, always reminding them what a favor the U.S. was bestowing, rather than summarily firing them. This would have also maintained some continuity of government services, which would have averted much of the chaos which ensued and greatly eased the transition to Iraqi self-governance.

But who am I to make such impertinent suggestions? I'm just a lowly corporate drone, not a highly seasoned foreign policy expert like resident geniuses Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.