# De-Baathification **De-Baathification** was the U.S. occupation's purge of members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party (see [[Baathism]]) from Iraqi public life. It was modeled rhetorically on the denazification of postwar Germany. With the order dissolving the Iraqi army a week later, it is the most consequential mistake of the [[Iraq War]] occupation: two orders that took apart the Iraqi state and handed its trained, armed and suddenly unemployed men to the insurgency. ## The two orders - **CPA Order No. 1 (May 16, 2003).** [[Paul Bremer]]'s first act as head of the [[Coalition Provisional Authority]]. It removed senior Baath Party members from public employment. The draft came out of the Pentagon policy shop of Undersecretary Douglas Feith under [[Donald Rumsfeld]]. Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who had long promoted the denazification analogy, went on to chair the De-Baathification Commission that carried it out. - **CPA Order No. 2 (May 23, 2003)** dissolved the Iraqi army and security services, putting roughly 400,000 soldiers out of work. Counting the wider security apparatus, estimates run to about half a million. ## Scope Estimates of the purge vary. Wikipedia's synthesis puts it at 50,000–100,000 civil servants, teachers and doctors removed before 2007, including about 12,000 teachers and education administrators. Many had joined the party because membership was the price of a state job, not out of conviction. Ministries lost the technocrats who ran electricity, health and finance, just as the occupation was being judged on whether the lights came on. ## Consequences - **The insurgency.** The purged and the disbanded were disproportionately Sunni Arabs. They lost their incomes and their stake in the new order at the same time, and many took their skills to the insurgency. Former Baathist officers later formed much of the military core of [[Islamic State]]. Admiral Mike Mullen, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the pairing created "security problems, and unnecessary sectarian tension." - **Sectarian politics.** A process run by Shia and exile politicians became a tool for settling scores and excluding Sunnis, which fed the Sunni boycott of the January 2005 elections. - **The reversal.** Iraq's 2008 Accountability and Justice Law partly rolled the policy back, allowing about 30,000 lower-ranking former members to return to public employment and about 3,500 senior members to draw pensions. By then the damage was done. ## Why it matters here De-Baathification is the vault's standard case of **ideological purge as state destruction**. A regime can be decapitated, but a purge that treats the whole party-state as the enemy destroys the capacity to govern and creates the enemy it was meant to prevent. The pattern is worth keeping in view against the vault's pages on the mass removal of career civil servants at home: see [[Schedule F]] and [[Executive Order 14410]]. ## See also - [[Coalition Provisional Authority]] · [[Paul Bremer]] · [[Baathism]] · [[Iraq War]] · [[Iraqi History Hub]] - [[Islamic State]] · [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Donald Rumsfeld]] · [[Sykes-Picot Agreement]]