At an enormous human and physical cost, American and new Iraqi forces are in almost complete control of the insurgent stronghold city of Fallujah. But this operation represents also the political failure of the strategy adopted by the United States in Iraq in recent months: “re-Ba’athification”.

After the fall of Saddam in April 2003, the interim Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi and his supporters in Washington fiercely opposed de-Ba’athification (the systematic removal of Saddam’s Ba’ath party supporters from the higher reaches of the state and military). The logic was plain: Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord draws its support from former Ba’athists and Iraq’s Sunni elite.

A wrong turning

In April 2004, a year after regime change, mounting international pressure over civilian casualties during the United States’s military operations around Fallujah led Washington to abandon the de-Ba’athification policy it had implemented after the overthrow of Saddam. Instead, the then-governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), created a “Fallujah Brigade” led by former Ba’athists with military experience of Saddam’s wars against his own people.

This signaled a wave of further appointments of high-ranking Ba’athists to top security service and government posts – just as Iyad Allawi had been advocating. Their thinking was that appointing former Sunni elite and Ba’athists to positions of power would kill two birds with one stone: making use of their “expertise” as well as appeasing the Sunni population.

Jasim Muhammed Salih was appointed commander of the Fallujah Brigade, but mounting opposition over his past role as chief of staff of a Republican Guard brigade who participated in the bloody suppression of the 1991 Shi’a uprising led to his removal only days later. The brigade command was then handed to a former Saddam intelligence officer, Mohammed Abdul Latif. As insurgency activity unsurprisingly soared once more in Fallujah, coalition forces eventually found the Fallujah Brigade to be effectively working alongside them by day and planning and executing insurgency activity by night. In September 2004, the Fallujah Brigade was quietly disbanded.

A dangerous game

The saga of the Fallujah Brigade symbolises the incompetence as well as the injustice of “re-Baathification”, and highlights the dangerous repercussions of this policy. Allawi’s aggressive restoration of Ba’ath elements to the government and security services has paved the way for people like Amer al-Hashimi to be appointed chief of staff of Iraq’s new army.

Al-Hashimi, a former major-general in Saddam’s army (and Salafist), was fired in August after being exposed for supplying Salafi insurgents with intelligence and promoting them to high ranks in the new Iraqi army. Al-Hashimi’s replacement was Mohammed Abdul-Qadr, former Ba’athist governor of Mosul and deputy chief of staff under Saddam; but even more worrying is that al-Hashimi himself was later appointed an advisor to the ministry of defence.

Allawi’s policy was reflected also in the appointment of Talib al-Lahibi as commander of the new Iraqi National Guard for the province of Diyala. Al-Lahibi, a former Saddam officer, was arrested in September when it came to light he was leading – rather than attempting to suppress – the insurgency in the province.

But Allawi’s gravest re-Ba’athification blunder was his appointment of Yousef Khalaf Mahmood as head of security for the Iraqi interim cabinet. Mahmood was arrested at the end of October after the discovery that he was working with the insurgents and had supplied them with the names and addresses of every government official and ministerial member of staff – six of whom (including family members) have been murdered in their homes. This blunder will keep insurgents busy for months to come.

It is clear that, under re-Ba’athification, the very people Iraq is relying upon for its rebuilding and democratisation are now sitting targets.