U.S. Policies Lead to Dire Straits for Some in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- From the Americans’ perspective, recent decisions to disband the defeated Iraqi army and bar full members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from state posts seemed like no-brainers.

But both decrees from the head of the U.S.-led occupation have angered Iraqis and created new problems for American and British authorities trying to run the country.

The decisions are good examples of how almost every action taken by the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority as it goes about the complex task of rebuilding Iraq has unintended, and often troublesome, consequences.

The dissolution of the army has left 400,000 men unemployed and with no prospect for jobs in the near future, imperiling families and creating a reservoir of fighters who could pose a threat to the occupation. The Baath Party decree, which also adds to the pool of potentially dangerous malcontents, has left many institutions without the people they need to make them run.

Graduating students have been unable to get their degrees. Police, electrical plants, even institutions like the nation’s premier dental school, have been slow to return to normal. And many people are complaining of injustice by the United States, arguing that Baath Party membership had been almost compulsory for anyone who wished to get ahead.

Ali Abbas worked for nearly two years toward his master’s degree in dentistry. He was supposed to graduate this month, but the U.S. decree last month to rid Iraqi institutions of Baath Party influence has stymied him. He lost his faculty advisor -- a high-ranking Baathist -- and now says he has to repeat a year of graduate school.

“Saddam Hussein was a criminal,” he said. “I hate him. But it is not my fault .... I am a dentist, a specialist, and I am confused and worried about my future. You saved us. But we need more cooperation from you.”

Brig. Gen. Raad Jassem Ani, meanwhile, can’t understand the decision to dissolve the military. The 45-year-old general, a member of a military family who lived for the navy until it was absorbed into the army a decade ago, risked his life in 1997 by joining the Free Officers and Civilians Movement, an outlawed, U.S.-backed effort to oust Hussein.

“There is nothing good about dissolving the army. Any military service is a duty -- why should that be dissolved?” he asked at his home, showing a scrapbook with pictures of himself in the 1980s as second-in-command of a naval corvette.

Jassem Ani asserted that the members of the army only fought the Americans when they had guns to their heads, because they did not like Hussein and preferred a U.S. victory to losing their own lives. Only Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary fighters and the Special Republican Guards, bribed and pampered by the regime, remained loyal, he said.

For the regular army, he said, “it was never about the regime. It was about our country. Even today we are proud of our country and we [servicemen] should be used together to rebuild Iraq.”

Now, like other military officers, Jassem Ani has been left without a job and without income, except for a small, one-time payment of up to $50 that the occupation authority has promised.

Things are even more dire at the Abdul Kareem household in the Shaab section of Baghdad. Three sons and their brother-in-law were in the army, bringing home a meager $120 a month among them. The brothers live with their parents, wives and children -- supporting 23 people in a four-room house on a dilapidated street where backed-up sewage leaks into the gutters. Thanks to the coalition decree, they are now unemployed.

“How can we live?” asked the brother-in-law, Col. Abdul Kareem Ahmad, now in civilian clothes and crowded by children and his wife’s family in their postage-stamp living room.

“We do not have savings for even one day,” said his wife, Shada. “We are having to sell our furniture.”

In a country where the military was the main employer, it is estimated that 2.5 million people -- 10% of the population -- were dependent on the 400,000-strong army for a meager living. Now the soldiers are joining the ranks of the jobless in a country where most adults are already unemployed.

The shock, both to national pride and pocketbooks, has resulted in almost daily anti-U.S. demonstrations by ousted military officers, sometimes coupled with threats that they will turn their anger against the occupiers, who are already facing an uphill fight to win over the Iraqi people.

“If this continues without any salaries and without any jobs, they will fight,” Ahmad warned. “They should at least pay up pensions. This is our right.”

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of the occupation troops, acknowledged last week that, by dissolving all agencies and banning their members from participating in civil society, the U.S. administrators might inadvertently have expanded the pool of malcontents willing to take up arms against the occupation.

In the case of Baath Party members, those who joined only so they could work as schoolteachers, doctors or engineers received the same punishment under the American decree as those who spied on their neighbors.

“My feeling is, to go to this extreme is wrong,” said Dr. Nizar Talabani, the newly appointed dean of the Dental School at Baghdad University. “You can not just say they are all bad.”

The dental school lost five faculty members. That left about 25 graduate students without an advisor -- and about 600 undergraduates without a professor to draw up their final exams. “Academically speaking, this is a mess,” Talabani said.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner headed the first postwar team of civil administrators to come to Iraq. He implemented a policy that allowed Baathists to retain their jobs as long as they had not been involved in what the U.S. considered to be criminal activity. Over and over, Garner’s aides said it was not their place to tell Iraqis how to come to terms with their past.

The policy reflected a certain pragmatism. For more than 30 years, the country was run as a one-party state, and that meant that millions of Iraqis had ties to the regime. It also meant that the bulk of the nation’s technocrats, those who ran the electric system, the police, the schools and the hospitals, were affiliated with the party.

But the Americans took tremendous heat for working so closely with the former Baathists. They made several high-profile mistakes, appointing prominent Baathists to ministries and positions of authority, and they began to lose credibility among those Iraqis who had refused to join the party.

Then came L. Paul Bremer III, Garner’s successor. Where Garner was low-profile, Bremer strode into Iraq in a suit and work boots and quickly issued the decrees. That seemed to answer criticism that the U.S. was too plodding in its efforts to rub out Hussein’s influence in this society.

Now many Iraqis who had initially welcomed the occupation are bitter.

Nedera Youssif, 59, is the headmistress of the Al Tadhiya Primary School for Girls in Baghdad. On a 105-degree day last week, she accompanied her former assistant, Salma Abdul Ahad, 56, to the occupation authority headquarters to ask for help. Her assistant had been dismissed for being a party member. “I am not a Baathist,” Youssif said in halting English. “I came here because she is a good woman. She is very good and a very hard worker. Her husband died, and she has four children.”

Balqis Hamid, 47, also lost her job as a chemistry teacher at the Omar Mukthar Secondary School in the Mahmoudia section of Baghdad because of her party membership. Her husband is unemployed, and she was the sole wage earner for her six children. Hamid said she joined the party simply because it meant a huge increase in her salary, from 3,500 dinars a month to 36,000.

“Because of these things, I was eager to become a member,” she said as she stood outside the occupation headquarters hoping for dispensation to get another job.

Many Iraqis say the U.S. decree is denying the country the services of its best and brightest.

Dr. Ahmed Ismail was one of the nation’s top orthodontists and was most recently dean of the nation’s top dental school. He was shown the door by the U.S. mandate. Now his colleagues want him back.

“The difficulty with this is you cannot just say they are all Baathists, we are finished with them,” said Dr. Khalid Mirza, a member of the dental faculty who was not a party member. “When you come to liberate us, I say, ‘Thank you.’ But when you throw the system out, you have to prove that you are better -- not to act in the same sort of way.”

Ismail and many other Baathist professionals aren’t completely sympathetic figures. They see themselves as victims, argue that the party was not totally evil, and think -- or at least say they think -- that the majority of people supported Hussein. But their lives were focused on education and health care, and now they are sidelined.

“Fine, remove them from their administrative posts,” Mirza added. “But to take them out of the college and to not let them teach is unfair.”