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Even more good news for Maliki- Ba'ath bill passed
11/26/07
Even more good news for Maliki
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament debated a draft bill granting permission to 14,000 former Ba'athists, all being from the Sunni community, to rejoin government jobs and the armed forces. All of them had been fired in 2003 in a ill-advised process called de-Ba'athification, engineered by US proconsul L Paul Bremer and the United States' number one man in Iraq at the time, Ahmad Chalabi.
Follow up:
Reconciliation with the Sunnis is a demand put forward by Sunni notables and the former US ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay
Khalilzad. It has been echoed at the highest level by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and US President George W Bush. The Americans believe that unless the Sunnis take part in government, they will never share in the rebuilding of Iraq, nor will they shoulder responsibility for its security. Only when given their former role in government and society (minus the presidency), would they work for a stable Iraq and successful political process, seeing it as an extension of their own success, stability and continuity.
Additionally, the Americans realize that all of their major allies in the Arab world (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar) are Sunni states which will not stand by and watch Iraqi Sunnis being crushed by the Shi'ites and Kurds. Not everybody in Iraq, however, shares in the US's enthusiasm for cooperation with the former Ba'athists, who total 1.4 million.
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