The author of this article is not known for being friendly to the “Arab Socialist Baath Party.” He supports neither its ideas nor its actions, the regimes it has established nor its opposition to already existing regimes, its Syrian version nor its Iraqi version, its civilians nor its soldiers, its right nor its left... I hope the reader will excuse my saying that few pundits and authors have written more polemics and critical pieces against the Baathist ideas and actions.
Nevertheless, the Iraqi “Islamic Dawa Party’s” approach to combating the Baath Party can only be called one thing: vindictive. Taking this approach renders politics and revenge interchangeable terms, while averting vengeance - as one of the acts violent politics must avert - is among the most important, if not the most important, functions of politics.
Recently, Iraqi Dawa Party deputies caused a stir by bizarrely objecting to the Jordanian government licensing a “new” party affiliated with the toppled Iraqi regime, the Baath Party in Jordan. They also demanded that the Jordanian ambassador in Baghdad be summoned for questions and informed of their protest.
The fact is that the Baath Party in Jordan is not new. It participated, as far back as the late fifties, in the government of Suleiman al-Nabulsi, and there is no evidence that any of its current actions break the rules of Jordanian political life. As for the Jordanian Baathists sharing the ideas, not actions, that the Baath in Iraq advocated until 2003, it does not justify the demand to clamp down on their party and prohibit it from engaging in political activity, especially when the demand is being made by a non-Jordanian faction.
However, we also know that the Dawa Party was largely responsible for Iraq’s “de-Baathification” policy, which began with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime twenty years ago. Soon afterward, though, de-Baathification showed itself to be vindictive against the Sunni community, taking the good with the bad and the innocent with the guilty. The Dawa Party continues to pursue “de-Baathification” to this day, albeit without using this term profusely, and seeks to export the implementation of this process to another country.
This kind of behavior is indicative of a whole host of matters found deep within our political life, which the Dawa Party is only one crude manifestation of.
Victors that persist in rooting out their opponents, both within and outside the country, are profoundly aware of the fragility of their victory and that they do not deserve the win that a third party had afforded them. While this particular deep internal doubt does have a basis in the miserable current state of affairs of Iraq, it is often accompanied by continued commitment to old rhetoric - the pre-victory rhetoric of imminent threats, being on the receiving end of conspiracies, and the continued enactment of the role of a perpetual victim. In Lebanese Hezbollah, the Dawa
Party’s sibling, we have a glaring example of this, as boasts of victory, ending the era of defeats, and humiliating Israel are found side by side with melodramatic lamentations of oppression and being an undermined victim of conspiracy.
Moreover, parties like Dawa leave no doubts as to whether much of the partisan and ideological noise in our region is anything more than “modern” camouflage for an explicitly sectarian bent. The homeland, Islam, Arabism, Palestine, or the working class may be the nominal slogan, but furthering the interests of a particular community by building its power and wealth is the actual objective - one that can only be met at the expense of another community. This resentful tribalism of our parties spews its vindictive poison under the cover ideological banners.
All this is a general overview of a school of Arab politics that has been around for a long time. The Baath Party was one of the most prominent founders of this school, and the Dawa Party has now become among its most prominent pillars.
The liquidation mindset remains as it was, and the same is true for the centrality of security, as well as the monopolization of truth and the categorization of anyone who contradicts this truth or refuses to defer to it as a traitor or conspirator. Upon taking power in two Arab countries, the Baathists canceled the history that had preceded the establishment of their regimes, just as the Dawa Party is doing now by rooting out any reminders of an Iraq that existed before Dawa.
We know that the latter was once a victim of the Baath in Iraq, and now we have the Baath turning into the Dawa’s victim - a broad, comprehensive, and never-ending process of reversing roles.
In this, we see reflections of the psychological theory that parental abuse turns children into violent and abusive people. And the Baath Party, in this sense, was among the greatest fathers of the Dawa. We will probably see something like the Baath reemerge sometime in the future, and it will be among the sons of the Dawa Party that are eager to beat it down.
