Now, this is something new, and something interesting. I've talked about ISIS a lot over the months, but not like this. To my understanding, it's not something that's been known for very long. This week has been fairly slow for new news, so I was getting discouraged as I surfed the web for a topic to discuss. Then I came across this article in The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/how-saddam-husseins-former-military-officers-and-spies-are-controlling-isis-10156610.html). In short, many of the high-ranking members of the Islamic State are ex-members of Iraq's Baath Party - the party of Saddam Hussein.
This is certainly interesting. Many comments have been made, and many political cartoons drawn, about the irony of the Coalition's air war against ISIS. In these cartoons, one character says something along the lines of, "We need a leader in Iraq who can control religious extremism!" to which one other figure replies, "Someone like Saddam Hussein?" And it's true - Saddam Hussein's government did a damn thorough job of curbing religious extremism. I say thorough job instead of good job because you can't really call anything the Baathists did "good." The Baathist leaders - and Saddam Hussein - took their inspiration from another all-too-familiar totalitarian regime from the 20th Century. In case it's not blatantly obvious, I'm talking about the Nazis. The secular Baathists persecuted the ethnic Kurds in the north of the country, which lead to the latter's steadfast alliance with the Coalition forces who invaded the country in 2003. Saddam's Iraq was one of the most brutal totalitarian states to survive into the 21st Century - estimates of the number of his own people his regime killed stretch into the millions. Saddam started out as the Baath Party's hired thug, which tells you a great deal about the man's character. Like the Nazis, Saddam had every intention of expanding his territorial empire for the sake of his own country - and his own government. He'd expected the international community to react to his efforts the way they'd reacted to Hitler's - Iraq's military in the early 1990's was among the largest in the world, with sophisticated Soviet-made weapons and a well-trained fighting force. Saddam wasn't counting on George H.W. Bush, a man who came across as quiet and meek, to rally the international community and create the Coalition. The Abrams tanks tore the Iraqi T-72's to shreds, while American fighters ruled the skies over Iraq. This halted Saddam's international ambitions, and he turned his attention to his own country. In short, members of the Baath Party were heavily involved in suppressing religious minorities and extremists.
To some extent, it shouldn't come as a surprise that many ex-Baathists now occupy the higher ranks of ISIS. One of the Islamic State's primary targets - the ethnic Kurds - was one of the Baathists' during the height of their power. It would hardly be a stretch for the Baathists to add Christians, Yazidis, and Turkmen to the list of individuals they persecuted - though Saddam's government wasn't openly hostile to these groups in the way that it was to the Kurds, there was certainly prejudice and bias against them. And ISIS could be their route back to power. As the Washington Post article reminds us, these men were accustomed to positions of power and influence within Iraq. Now that a legitimate government has been created, their only route back to power is through illegitimate means - just as ex-Confederates were banned from holding offices after the Civil War, ex-Baathists are banned from being elected in modern Iraq. It stands to reason that many of these ex-generals, officers, and officials would turn to ISIS to regain a taste of their former power. Deserters from ISIS have corroborated these notions. Saddam's lackeys are using the Islamic State as a vehicle to return themselves and their ideology to power. In short, they want to bring back Saddam's era to the whole of Iraq, extinguishing the flame of democracy that's been burning for the past decade. Frankly, this topic is extremely depressing. The Iraqi people have suffered just about as much as any group has in the 21st Century. And now, the Neo-Nazis of the Baath Party have aligned themselves with the terror group that's too brutal for Al-Qaeda to make them suffer even more. This is the jacked-up world we live in. As if we needed more cause to hate ISIS, we now know that a bunch of their highest-ranking members are directly inspired by the Nazis. What'll be next? They form an alliance with North Korea? You'd hope that their association with the Baathists would be the limit of their evil, but they've just continued to surprise me. I'm convinced there's no end to it.
On that happy note...happy Easter and/or Passover, to all those of you who celebrate!
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