U.S. backs jobs for Iraq Baathists

In a reversal spurred by unrest and unemployment, some members of Hussein's party and ex-military officers can return.

By Robert Moran

BAGHDAD - In another reversal of Bush administration policy, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday that former rank-and-file members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party and former senior military officials would be allowed to hold jobs in the Iraqi government and military.

As the coalition prepares for the June 30 return of sovereignty to Iraqis, Bremer is seeking to solve both the security crisis and crushing levels of unemployment, which are partly a result of ostracizing former Baath Party members, many of them skilled technocrats.

The announcement of the policy shift increased concerns that the Bush administration was heading toward the June 30 restoration of sovereignty to Iraqis without a strong compass.

Rick Barton, an analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press, "It points out that making mistakes at the front end takes a heroic effort later to reverse."

During a series of congressional hearings in Washington this week, administration officials suggested that plans for the transition remained embryonic nine weeks before the handover but that the sovereignty returned to Iraqis would be limited so the U.S. military would retain a free hand in the country.

The interim government, for example, would not have the authority to enact legislation before full elections that are envisioned by early 2005, nor would it have the authority to block U.S. military decisions.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told a Dutch broadcaster yesterday that the administration would push for a new Security Council resolution to authorize peacekeeping forces in Iraq after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan approved a plan for an interim government. It was unclear, however, whether council members would sign off on a plan that restored such limited sovereignty and left the United States in control of the country.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told the Associated Press yesterday that members of the interim government "are going to be running Iraq with full authority over the ministries, and they'll be running Iraq on a daily, day-to-day basis."

But, he said, by their nature, temporary governments tend not to make sweeping changes. "Those kind of sweeping changes, the broad and complete establishment of all the structures of government in Iraq, is something for a constitutional group to do," Boucher said. "And that will come by next January."

Two coalition soldiers were killed yesterday, raising the number of coalition fatalities in April to 109 - including 106 U.S. troops. It has been the worst month for coalition deaths since the start of the war, and U.S. officials fear that a resumption of fighting in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallujah would produce more U.S. and Iraqi casualties and turn more Iraqis against the coalition.

'Impossible conditions'

In Karbala, an attack on a military convoy launched by militiamen loyal to Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr killed a Bulgarian soldier, officials said. Near Samarra, a U.S. soldier was killed by an improvised bomb.

In Kufa, Sadr told worshipers at Friday prayers that talks to defuse the standoff between his Mahdi Army and U.S. troops on the outskirts of the city and nearby Najaf had failed. U.S. authorities are seeking to disband his guerrilla force and arrest him in connection with the slaying of a pro-U.S. cleric in Najaf last April.

"The Americans set impossible conditions, and I can't accept them," he said at the Kufa Mosque. "If I say yes, then that means we've lost everything."

A battle is inevitable, he warned, urging his supporters to strike at the troops with every means at their disposal, possibly even suicide attacks.

"We'll all be time bombs for the enemy," he said.

Some of the recent violence is being blamed on Hussein loyalists, particularly in such Sunni strongholds as Fallujah that were favored by the former regime. Those areas have been subject to the punitive "de-Baathification" process, which resulted in an estimated 400,000 Iraqis losing their jobs.

Bremer, in taped remarks broadcast on Iraqi TV, defended his early decision to ban the Baath Party and strip its members of their jobs, but he said that the process that allowed Iraqis who were members in name only to return to work was "poorly implemented."

Complaints reviewed

"Many Iraqis have complained to me that de-Baathification policy has been applied unevenly and unjustly," Bremer said. "I have looked into these complaints, and they are legitimate."

While rehabilitating some members of Hussein's regime might ease tension with the Sunni minority, which dominated the party, some Shiites objected. Ahmed Chalabi, a former exile and Shiite Governing Council member backed by officials in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office, said allowing Baathists into the government would be akin to letting Nazis join a German government.

Bremer announced that thousands of teachers whose appeals had been approved but who were not allowed to return to work would get their jobs back. The procedure also would be accelerated for hundreds of professors, but they still would need to be vetted of any past transgressions, Bremer said.

"Professors who did not use their posts to intimidate others or commit crimes should be allowed to return to work promptly," he said.

Thousands of other former Baath Party members will begin to receive pensions under the new policy, Bremer said.

He said the reformation of Iraq's military would include increasing numbers of senior officers from the disbanded army. He noted that more than 70 percent of the men now in the Iraqi army and Civil Defense Corps served in the army under the old regime.

Coalition officials said it was expected throughout the occupation that the new military would need the experience and knowledge of former generals and colonels.

"You can't pull generals out of thin air," coalition spokesman Dan Senor said. But he said that former Baathists and military officers would be reintegrated only if they did not have "blood on their hands" and that the prohibition against top party and government officials from the former regime would remain.

From: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/8507400.htm