Iraq’s already fragile political order has been thrust into further turmoil in the past three weeks over an attempt to bar 511 candidates, several of them prominent political figures, from legislative elections in March for alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. The decision, taken by Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission, has the potential to ignite a new civil war and precipitate the collapse of the post-2003 order.
The commission is a re-baptised but hardly reformed version of the De-Baathification Commission established by Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, in 2003. Lack of procedural clarity, transparency, or impartial oversight have turned it into a blunt weapon wielded by a small group of people to settle old scores and advance their own political fortunes in an election year. This group is feeding on and at the same time fanning popular fears concerning the former regime’s possible return, and hiding behind the broad support among the ruling parties for a process of de-Baathification designed to keep them in power. In an unstable Iraq that is anticipating a US troop withdrawal, the commission’s ruling has lit a brushfire that the fractious political elite may prove unable to put out.
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