Baath Party Research Articles

The Islamic State" in the Context of Political Changes in the Middle East

The article "The Islamic State phenomenon in the framework of the political changes in the Middle East" is dedicated to the "Islamic State", one of the most powerful and dangerous extremist organizations. Author realizes in this article: research of the genesis and causes of appearance of the movement "Islamic State"; analysis of the sociopolitical and geopolitical situation of the Iraqi Sunni community after the American invasion of 2003; bringing to the light factors of the high scale propagation of the Islamic extremism in Syria and Iraq; research of the military and political potential of the "Islamic State" and factors which could impede its expansion. Author considers "Islamic State" as an emergent phenomenon giving huge impact on the political situation in the Middle East. It provoked repartition of the old frontiers existed since the Sykes-Pico treaty of 1916. To the author's opinion oppression of the Iraqi Sunni community by the government of Nuri al-Maliki was the main cause of the Sunni revolt in Summer of 2014. Sunni tribes of Northern Iraq and former Baath party members were the driving forces of the revolt but then Jihadi extremists hijacked this revolt. To the author's mind elimination of the "Islamic State" is impossible without reconciliation between various religious communities in Syria and Iraq.

The US and the Emergence of Islamic State (IS): The Paradox of America’s War on Terror

This research work studies “The US and the Emergence of Islamic State (IS): The Paradox of America’s War on Terror”. One cannot study the history of the contemporary Islamic terrorism without the involvement of the US. This is because the US has always been at the front burner of the war for and against terror, depending on the situation at a particular point in time. The emergence of Islamic State (IS) has given more impetus to international terrorism, chaos is spreading from the Middle East to other parts of the world as hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi refugees pour into other regions of the world especially Europe for refuge. Over the last decade, millions of Iraqis and Syrians have fled their homes. Many also have been killed in this campaign of Islamic terror. This work moves from cataloguing the activities of the IS to a historical analysis of how the US invasion of Iraq led to the monster we today call IS. This work is guided by the psycho-cultural theory of conflicts, this theory is adopted as result of the fact that it is a psychoanalytical tool that addresses violence at a personal, cultural and psychological level. The psycho-cultural theory of conflicts contends that psychological, religious and other cultural and identity based contradictions are the basis of conflict in the society. This work hence discovers that the US invasion of Iraq is the chief cause of the IS led violent conflict going on in the Middle East presently. The reason for the invasion and the sectarian favouritism the US extended to the Shia population spurred the Sunni who felt short-changed into what we now call IS terror campaign. Secondly, the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, which involved the US armed forces had a radicalising effect on the Iraqi Sunni population and members of the deposed Hussein’s secular Baath Party. Finally, a sizeable number of the prisoners in the US detentionfacilities in Iraq during the occupation were Islamic extremists and former members of the deposed Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party who converted to radical Islam in American prisons. Thus when the occupation ended, these men had every reason to pick up arms to create an Islamic State where they will feel safer. This work, based on the findings, concludes by proposing recommendations on how the threat posed by IS could be ameliorated, and also how to prevent the emergence of such a large scale terror campaign in the future.

Literary Defiance: An Interview with Hassan Blasim

10 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 THE STORIES OF WRITER and filmmaker Hassan Blasim have come to Englishspeaking readers via an unusual route: selfpublished online in Arabic and collected in book form only upon English translation. I first encountered Blasim and his work in 2013 when reading alongside him at the London literary event WordFactory—with his engaging smile and sheer enthusiasm for storytelling and for life, he won over both audience and fellow writers with tales of his journey into exile from Iraq. He left his home country due to concerns his films did not play well with those in power there and has lived in Finland since 2004. As of 2014, Blasim’s stories have yet to appear in book form in their original Arabic, but some of his stories in Arabic may still be read on the website Iraqstory.com. Many of Blasim’s stories explicitly reference the conflicts of recent years in Iraq and the surrounding area, albeit in unpredictable ways. The title story concerns an Iraqi soldier who happens to be Christian, known as Chewgum Christ, whose premonitions during the Iraq–Kuwait War save the lives of many fellow soldiers, among them the narrator. Later, as a civilian, Chewgum Christ is forced to carry out a suicide bombing and meets the narrator again in the afterlife. The stories are often disturbing to read, but when do the events of war make for comfortable reading? The life of this interview began when Hassan Blasim and Jonathan Wright were announced as joint winners of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ. Over time, it grew into an investigation of how writers transform and translate news and recent events into fiction. Lane Ashfeldt: Why is it important that stories from Iraq reach readers now? Hassan Blasim: What is happening in Iraq now did not come about by chance. It’s an extension of the destruction and the wars that the dictator (i.e., Saddam Hussein) fought earlier, wars in which international capitalism was, and still is, a significant factor. In Iraq we haven’t yet written about the tragedy of the dictator’s futile wars with Iran and Kuwait or about the massacres the Baath Party carried out in the 1970s against the opposition parties, partly because of censorship and partly because of the bloody and terrifying events that followed. Iraq has been a maelstrom of violence and destruction for more than five decades. Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop, however vicious it might be. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it. LA: In the first story in your prizewinning collection, The Song of the Goats, a televised story contest acts as a lead-in: The man in the smart suit came back on and urged the contestants to calm down. In simple words he explained Literary Defiance An Interview with Hassan Blasim by Lane Ashfeldt Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it. Q&A WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 photo : sami kero / helsingin sanomat that the best stories did not mean the most frightening or the saddest, what mattered was authenticity and the style of narration. He said the stories should not necessarily be about war and killing. I was upset by what he said, and I noticed that most of the contestants paid no attention. A man the size of an elephant whispered in my ear, “It’s bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story’s a story, whether it’s beautiful or bullshit.” So is this an argument for content over form, or just a reaction against someone else telling you how to do your job? HB: The story “Song of the Goats” makes fun of attempts to talk about the style of a story or of language in a world of madness and barbarity. In fact, when I despaired of having my stories published in Arabic as books, I published most of my texts on the Internet for more than six years...

Syrian Sport on an International Stage: Evaluating the Sports Movement between 1970 and 2013

Although Syria did not compete in Olympic Games between 1948 and 1970, its participation in most sport mega-events has been varied in terms of the level of participation, results, different championships and sports mega-events types since 1970. The nature of Syria's involvement in sport on the international stage reflects the nature of the institutional-culture context after the ‘Corrective Movement’ led by the late President Hafez al-Assad. This article relies on the official archive of the General Sport Federation in Syria, official International Olympic Committee publications and other material to examine the history of Syria's competitions and its results in different sports events. It is argued that Syrian competition in most regional/international games has not only been because of the social/political support represented by the Baath party but also it has been a means of reflecting the civilised and secular face of Syria and Syrians after a long period of coups in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper concludes by contending that political stability between 1970 and 2011 helped the sports movement to flourish. Even political conflicts after 2011 did not influence the desire for competition, but it was noted that the lack of security, and the increasing terrorism and political/economic sanctions, were the major barriers to Syrian sport on an international stage after the ‘Arab Spring’, which had a negative impact on the support of most sports teams and missions.

Arab Spring, Islamist Ice Age

Between June 30th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Islamist military takeover
 in Sudan, and July 4th, Independence Day in the United States, something
 miraculous happened in the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in agreement,
 and – almost – everyone was happy. President Bashar al-Assad was ecstatic.
 In an interview with the Baath Party’s newspaper Al-Thawra shortly after the
 army deposed Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first-ever freely elected civilian president,
 on July 3, Assad applauded the coup as marking “essentially the fall of
 political Islam.”1 In his lengthy interview, he categorized his enemies into two
 groups: those “who completely abandoned their identity and embraced a ‘Western
 Dream’ even with all its flaws” and those “who went in exactly the opposite
 direction and abandoned their identity and embraced religious extremism.”2
 The latter he alternatively designated as “Wahhabis” or “Takfiris.”
 In the presumed bastions of Wahhabism in the Gulf, Morsi’s downfall
 was received with even more elation. Within days, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
 the UAE pledged an aid package worth USD 12 billion to cash-strapped
 Egypt, showing how much they appreciated this outcome.3 And while Israel
 joined its sworn enemy Hamas in maintaining a guarded silence,4 its media
 (and some politicians) did not hide their glee at Morsi’s political demise.5
 As usual, the Obama administration was either unable to make up its mind
 or was too embarrassed to say what it believed. But that was in itself a clear
 stance, since the United States was happy to permit its key allies to provide
 massive cash injections to the new army-backed regime. It also refrained from ...

Notes from the Underground: The Rise of Nouri Al-Maliki and the New Islamists

Notes from the Underground: The Rise of Nouri Al-Maliki and the New Islamists

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

The 2003 Iraq War: Operations, Causes, and Consequences

The Iraq war is the Third Gulf War that was initiated with the military invasion of Iraq on March 2003 by the United States of American and its allies to put an end to the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein, the fifth President of Iraq and a prominent leader of the Baath party in the Iraqi region. The chief cause of this war was the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) that George W. Bush declared in response to the attacks of September 11. The events of this war were both brutal and severe on both parties as it resulted in the defeat of the Iraqi army and the depose and execution of Saddam Hussein, in addition to thousands of causalities and billionsof dollars expenses.This paperdiscusses the overt as well as the covert reasons behind the Iraqi war, in addition to its different objectives. It alsodiscusses the course of the war and its aftermath. This would shed the light on the consequences of the war on the political, economic, social, and humanitarian levels. Finally, the true intentions of the war are speculated.

Requiem for the Baath Party: Struggle for Change and Freedom in Syria

The Baath Party has ruled Syria with an iron fist since the 1960s, curbing civil liberties and imprisoning and executing anyone who dared oppose its rule. A major anti-Baath struggle erupted in the 1980s as Syrians rebelled, trying to topple the repressive regime. The ruling party violently suppressed dissidents and maintained its death grip on power. The 2011 public uprising against the regime was significant in its countrywide scope. Inspired by the fight of people throughout the Arab world, it challenged the authority of the despotic leader. Disenchanted Syrians organized protest rallies, demanding demonstrable change and freedom and an end to decades of repressive rule — a struggle whose successful conclusion depends on the resiliency of oppressed and dispossessed Syrians and the alignment of their cause to the self-serving interests of foreign parties able to lend them support in their struggle against the Baathist rule.

Immortality in the Secret Police Files: The Iraq Memory Foundation and the Baath Party Archive

AbstractShortly after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a long time Iraqi dissident and professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, uncovered a major trove of documents belonging to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and his security forces. The documents proved highly important in reflecting the inner workings of the Baath Party system in his final years in power. Soon after the discovery of the documents, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a private Washington, D.C.–based group founded by Makiya, took custody of the records, later depositing them with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to provide a safe haven for them. The deal ignited immediate international controversy and charges of pillage from some Iraqi officials, archival organizations, scholars, and others who also demanded their immediate return to the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad. On the surface, these charges of theft and plunder appear plausible enough, but on examination, a different and complicated narrative emerges in light of the conventions of war, U.S. law, and the Iraqi penal code, as well as the chain of events surrounding their taking and removal by nonstate actors in the Iraqi theatre of war and occupation.

"Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back": Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records

This paper explores the political, legal, and ethical issues at stake in the debate over the custody of the Iraqi Baath Party records. The dispute over the records' past and discussion about their future reveals a larger political struggle over the custody of records seized during wartime. Prevailing international law deems these records cultural property and provides legal guidelines for their treatment and return. Ethical arguments in favor of the seizure highlight the protection of the records as well as their accessibility to international researchers and human rights lawyers, while arguments against the seizure stress the importance of the records to the formation of national identity and nation-building in Iraq. Underlying the political, legal, and ethical arguments surrounding these records are two contrasting views of cultural property: on the one hand, cultural property is seen as an expression of national rights to which members of a nation are entitled, and, on the other hand, access to cultura...

Doubting the Global War on Terror

Soon after Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the "Global War on Terror". This article examines the 'two-track' process that US neoconservatives and 'echo chamber' media used, to promote the GWOT grand strategy. It re-examines why many experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. Historical counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all.

Mass deception: moral panic and the U.S. war on Iraq

he attacks of 9/11 pre-empted a war against the nation of Iraq, although there was no clear-cut evidence that the nation's leader Saddam Hussein was linked to Osama Bin Laden's Baath Party. Five years later, with the execution of Saddam Hussein and no proof of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. is still embroiled in a war with Iraq. Why would such a war garner so much acceptance in its primary stages? This book offers empirical evidence that the deceptive rhetoric of the Bush administration actually manufactured US public support of invading Iraq. Bonn examines a theoretical position that the war was legitimized by an elite-engineered moral panic precipitated by the Bush administration and reinforced by the news media which exploited pre-existing negative stereotypes of Arabs and influenced public opinion on support for the invasion of Iraq. Bonn also asserts that the Bush administration is guilty of elite deviance, stating that moral panic constitutes elite deviance and the invasion and occupation of Iraq are state crimes in violation of international law.

US Blunders in Iraq: De-Baathification and Disbanding the Army

In May 2003 Paul Bremer issued CPA Orders to exclude from the new Iraq government members of the Baath Party (CPA Order 1) and to disband the Iraqi Army (CPA Order 2). These two orders severely undermined the capacity of the occupying forces to maintain security and continue the ordinary functioning of the Iraq government. The decisions reversed previous National Security Council judgments and were made over the objections of high ranking military and intelligence officers. The article concludes that the most likely decision maker was the Vice President.

Regime-Transitions in the 2003-2010 Iraq War: An Approach Based on Correlations of Daily Fatalities

This paper studied the dynamics of civilian and military fatalities in the Iraq War during the 2003-2010 period. R/S-scaling analysis, a method to characterize fractality and memory effects in sequences, was used to estimate time variations in the correlations of daily fatalities. Together with concepts from complex social networks and systems theories, the dynamics of correlations (measured in terms of the so-called scaling Hurst exponent) provide a framework to describe the Iraq War evolution and to evaluate the effects of the major military and political events. In terms of changes in a correlations parameter, five regimes in the evolution of the war were identified. The first regime, occurring in the first months after the invasion, corresponds to a conventional confrontation. In the second regime occurred in the last months of 2004, the dynamics of civilian fatalities evolved toward uncorrelated behavior, indicating that the occurrence of daily fatalities was basically governed by random processes. This is in contrast to the dynamics of military fatalities that showed increased correlations. The second regime can be seen as the advent of a chaotic episode where the different insurgency groups acted within an erratic, poorly coordinated, manner. In the third regime that occurred in the first two 2005 quarters, correlations of civilian fatalities increased and converged into the correlations patterns of military fatalities, and this was interpreted as the surging of a well-organized, although non-centralized, insurgency structure. The fourth regime lasted from mid-2005 to the last 2007 months and showed an important correlation decrement for the military fatalities. This was related to the clash of two antagonist war structures, namely, the traditional centralized Coalition Army and a non-centralized insurgent army. Finally, the fifth regime, from mid-2007 to date, is characterized by stable fatality dynamics converging to uncorrelated behavior. It is apparent that this behavior is related to the start of the endgame to achieve stable economy and government. The concept of a scale-free network was used to describe the insurgency operations and the subsequent war and political events oriented to incorporate the former Baath Party member in the formation of a national Iraqi government. It is concluded that, given the availability of data (fatalities, economic activity, migration, etc.) in contemporary conflicts, the usage of mathematical methods and tools would provide further insights of the conflict evolution and, in this way, help to design better policies and strategies to reduce the adverse effects of violence on civilians.

Foreign Occupation and National Pride: The Case of Iraq

Investigators from such disparate fields as public opinion research and comparative history agree that foreign occupation tends to provoke nationalist awareness. Engaging this growing body of literature, we focus on the affective side of nationalism—the feeling of national pride—and argue that foreign domination by itself does not necessarily incite this feeling among all members of the population under occupation. Rather, (a) the perception of the occupation held by the public is related to national pride and (b) this perception is anchored in communal attributes. A survey of Iraqis (n = 2,700) in 2004 found that the only common factor that is linked to national pride for the Sunnis, Shi’is, and Kurds is attitude against foreign Muslim militants. In addition, for the Sunnis, it was linked to attitudes against foreign presence and in favor of the Baath party. For the Shi’is, national pride was inversely related to their attitudes toward American moral values. For the Kurds, national pride is linked to attitudes toward the political issues over which the Sunnis and Shi’is have consensus—attitudes against foreign presence and disbanding the former Iraqi army, and a rejection of American moral values. Implications for the study of national pride are discussed.

Islam as a point of reference for political and social groups in Iraq

AbstractIraq occupies a special position in the general context of re-Islamization of Arab societies because of the US occupation and the absence of a viable state. The attempt to rebuild communities under the aegis of the United States led to a widespread withdrawal back into communities in which Islam plays a vital role. Sectarian identities were intensified, particularly because they built on layers largely secularized by years of a form of political life that had been partly dominated by secular or secularist parties (Communist Party, Baath party). It looks as if a secularized form of Islam, whose vocation is primarily to confer an identity and which has become impervious to any religious code, is likely to fuel the fighting, which is all the more inexpiable because each person believes that he is fighting for survival as a member of his community.

The Road to Baghdad: The United States and the Persian Gulf

The Road to Baghdad: The United States and the Persian Gulf

The Ethics of Lustration

One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions ofjus post bellum, it is arguably one of the most important. The pursuit of administrative justice affects the reconstitution of the public sphere—literally and figuratively—in more fundamental ways than most other institutions of transitional justice. Yet our understanding of the ethics of occupation in the twenty-first century continues to be incomplete, and ethical principles are needed for guiding and clarifying how occupations may justly be carried out and for establishing a legitimate role for international morals in the conduct of peace. This article develops three such principles for guiding the practice of lustration, and argues that they have been widely flouted during the occupation of Iraq. This is problematic from the perspective ofjus post bellum, for to paraphrase Michael Walzer's argument inJust and Unjust Wars, the restraint ofpeaceis the beginning of peace.

Transitional Injustice? Criteria for Conformity of Lustration to the Right to Political Expression

In order to promote democratic consolidation, countries undergoing the transition from repressive regimes often attempt to address past injustices and launch deep institutional reforms.1 These meas...