Officials Rethink Ban on Baathists

WASHINGTON â€”  As part of a broad effort to draw more Sunni Muslims into Iraq’s power structure, U.S. officials have begun a push to make sure they are not unfairly excluding former Iraqi military officers and Baath Party officials from posts in the new government, a senior administration official said.

Coalition and Iraqi authorities have worked hard since last year’s invasion to make sure that the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s governing class and military structure have been removed from top posts. But many Iraqis, U.S. military field commanders and international officials believe that the “de-Baathification� effort has gone too far, depriving the new Iraqi government of needed skills and dangerously alienating the Sunni minority.

In an interview shortly before he was named Iraq’s interior minister, Samir Shakir Mahmoud said: “Everyone is aware of the risk of terrorism. But there are risks inside Iraq that are within our control and we’re not managing them well. I would like to flag the de-Baathification process.

“If applied insensitively and carelessly, it increases our risk, rather than reduces it. There is a serious problem here.�

Under the policy, all Baath Party members were forced out of their government jobs, leaving crucial ministries and other services with almost no employees. Low-level functionaries with no ties to criminal activity are eligible to reapply for their positions, but the process is slow and cumbersome -- and some members of the Iraqi Governing Council are determined to keep any former Baath Party members from government posts.

After criticism last week by the United Nations’ special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, that the effort was excluding too many Sunnis, coalition authorities are taking a new look at the process “to make sure it’s working as advertised,� the U.S. official said.

He insisted that the review did not amount to a change in the rules, but rather was an effort to make sure the process was working efficiently.

The official said that, at the same time, the U.S. and its allies were planning to step up efforts to educate the minority Sunnis about the planned new government, in an effort to convince them that reform is in their interests and to draw more of them in.

And he said that a key goal of the just-concluded trip by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage to the Persian Gulf was to urge Sunni-led Arab governments in the region to help persuade Sunni Iraqis to take a role in the new order.

Shortly after taking office last May, the civilian administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, announced the de-Baathification policy as a way to remove the influence of Hussein’s corrupt single-party system.

He also disbanded the military and the police force, putting hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of work.

Sunni Muslims make up only about 30% of Iraq’s population, but they controlled Hussein’s government. Many of the most highly educated Iraqis are Sunni. Most of the rest of the population are Shiite Muslims who, though dominant in numbers, suffered under Hussein.

Under Hussein, the Baath Party had an estimated 1.5 million members, most of whom joined only because they had been told they could not get a job, a bonus or admission to college for their children without the party’s support.

After the U.S.-led invasion, even though they had been accused of no crimes -- unlike high-ranking party officials implicated in corruption, torture and other offenses -- low-level bureaucrats also lost their jobs.

The Sunnis excluded under the policy include physicians, engineers and schoolteachers.

In the last year, disaffected Sunnis have been among the most dangerous elements in the insurgency, especially in the area north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle.

News of the U.S. government’s new approach was first reported Wednesday night by the Washington Post.

The de-Baathification policy has been a hot issue for months. Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite Muslim and chairman of the council’s de-Baathification committee, has overseen an aggressive campaign to rid Iraq of Baathist influences.

Iyad Allawi, a senior member of the council and a Sunni, has pushed to ease the rules, arguing that the coalition was fomenting insurrection and damaging reconstruction efforts by excluding an important talent pool.

Job candidates who have been rejected because of de-Baathification are entitled to appeal, but many contend that the process is slow and unfair.

The absence of a cooperative Sunni elite has been a significant obstacle to the coalition’s effort to build a new government. In a process similar to the one in Afghanistan that resulted in Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pushtun, assuming power, U.S. officials have been scouring Iraq since the invasion in search of a Sunni leader of stature who could step forward to head that community. But so far, they have been disappointed.

Some analysts are warning that without a strong Sunni leadership, Iraqi’s new democratic government could fail before it gets started.

Yet the coalition also faces risks if it goes too far, because many Shiites are deeply fearful that their oppressors from the old regime will be restored to positions of authority.

Times staff writer Edmund Sanders in Baghdad contributed to this report.