“By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.” Such a warning from a local CIA station chief would cause most policymakers to reconsider their course of action. And yet, the U.S. authorities in Iraq ignored it, pressing ahead with their plan to remove members of the Baath party from positions of power. In order to craft a de-Baathification process following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the United States adopted policies that it claimed were based heavily on the denazification policies enacted in the American-occupied zone of West Germany to
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