NKVD in Iraq

db: References to the Baath party in the draft constitution document reads like an NKVD notice, 2 million Baathists have been criminalised - as a means of negating their political authenticity, and excluding them en masse from the so-called democratic process and who knows what else:

Article (7): 1st - Entities or trends that advocate, instigate, justify or propagate racism, terrorism, "tafir" (declaring someone an infidel), sectarian cleansing, are banned, especially the Saddamist [?] Baath Party in Iraq and its symbols, under any name. It will be not be [sic!] allowed to be part of the multilateral political system in Iraq, which should be defined according to the law.
- Sounds more like the NKVD than democracy rising from the ashes [we will be back with more concerning the status of the Baath purge - the one using guns as well as the one that is more overt].

When the oppressed become the oppressor, as seems to be happening in Iraq, new dangers arise. The murder of 58 teachers as reported here might be a case in point. In case you wonder, nobody seeks to establish that all Baaths are innocent - however when millions of people are branded as villains - and the media is relatively silent about it - then it is permitted to ask some questions, rather than accept wholesale the black and white version of events that we are fed by our governments and, for the most part (with some notable exceptions) the media.

Juan Cole wrote: "If the US had tried to exclude Japanese members of the fascist government after the war the way they are doing to the Baathists, Japan would also have become ungovernable."


** NKVD poster above reads "We will eradicate spies and diversionists, agents of the Trotskyite-Bukharinite fascists"