Baath Party Is Bedrock of Hussein’s Power Base

When the Iraqi government announced late last year that every one of the nation’s 11.5 million eligible voters turned out for a national referendum, and that every one of them voted to keep Saddam Hussein as president, the United States dismissed the results as propaganda.

But it appears that there was an important message coming from that pseudo-election. The lesson was not that Hussein is loved, but that his ruling Baath Party is so firmly in control, so well organized, that it was easily able to mobilize millions of citizens to go to the polls in a one-candidate vote.

The Baath Party is one of Hussein’s primary levers of power, and now that there is war, it has proven one of his most effective weapons. Party loyalists, often joining with paramilitary fighters, have put up stiff resistance in the south, staging guerrilla strikes and attacking supply lines on the road south of Najaf, U.S. military officials say.

In Basra, several hundred party members dressed in civilian clothes have exchanged fire with British troops seeking to enter Iraq’s second-largest city, according to the British. In some cases, party members have forced Iraqi soldiers to fight or face execution, and they have threatened to kill civilians if they tried to flee, say the U.S. and expatriate Iraqis.

With the pivotal battle for Baghdad now at hand, the party’s militia is expected to serve as Hussein’s final line of defense, his firewall between survival and liquidation. If they fight, the Baathists are poised for urban warfare, the type of street fighting American and British troops want to avoid.

And there is every reason to believe the party members will fight.

“They are so strict and obey orders right away,” said Mohammed Ismail, 26, an Egyptian businessman who spent two weeks with Baath Party members in Iraq last summer at what he called a summer camp. “Above all, they have unbelievable loyalty to Saddam Hussein. They truly love this guy.”

There may be another reason they are -- and will continue -- fighting.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when it appeared the U.S. might help oust Hussein’s government, there were popular uprisings in the north and south, and Baath Party members were targets of revenge. They were hanged, their bodies burned and their homes looted before Hussein sent in elite army forces to quell the uprisings. That memory remains fresh.

“Their destiny is now stuck with the government,” Saad Jawad, a political scientist from Baghdad, said before the current war began.

In conventional terms, Iraq made very few preparations for a military assault this time. The wide flat roads leading into the country, for example, were largely unprotected, except for an occasional trench or machine gunner.

But that may have been part of a calculation that Iraq did not stand a chance of winning a conventional war.

Instead, Hussein’s government began early and aggressively to prepare its Baath Party members to fight and maintain civil order.

The party has its roots in a political ideology grounded in Arab nationalism. But during Hussein’s more than two decades in power, he has transformed it into a hybrid security force, separate and apart from traditional intelligence and military services.

In addition to its own militia, the organization has a network of spies and informers. All of the top military and political officials in Iraq must, by definition, belong to the Baath Party. It is the formal institution of authority, though true power in Iraq rests in the hands of a small elite.

In the run-up to the war, Baathists were trained and organized for combat. Party loyalists were appointed to every neighborhood, street and, in some cities, block to keep the public in line.

Ahmed Abdul Kalik, 27, is a Baath Party member from Kirkuk, a northern Iraqi city that is rich in oil and a potential hot spot because of its mixed ethnic population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens. Five months before the invasion, he had already been given a military assignment in the event of war.

“I don’t think the party will lose control,” he said at the time, displaying a confidence and bravado evident in many of his Baathist colleagues. “Party members can defend Iraq. It is impossible that they could win. We will fight.”

In Baghdad, where every neighborhood has its own party headquarters, the buildings appear more like military fortresses than political clubhouses. Each headquarters is usually guarded by party members dressed in dark green military uniforms carrying AK-47 assault rifles. Antiaircraft artillery is often located nearby.

“I can tell you that we are highly prepared,” said Abdel Hussein, 52, a 35-year party member who was assigned last November to search out expatriate opponents of Hussein who might have sneaked into Saddam City, an impoverished neighborhood of Shiite Muslims long oppressed by Hussein’s Sunni Muslim regime.

“Everyone has his own duty,” he said before the war. “We are all being trained. We are dividing ourselves into many groups.... We are highly organized.”

The party has a formal hierarchy, one that maximizes leadership control while limiting its vulnerability to infiltration. Candidates must pass through four steps before becoming full members: sympathizer, supporter, nominee and trainee.

Of the 2 million citizens that Iraqi officials say are affiliated with the party, an estimated 40,000 are full members. Each person is assigned to a cell, which consists of three to five members, and only one member of each cell is linked to the next level up.

Over the years, the structure has expanded to include junior membership. “Baath’s Vanguards” are teenagers up to the age of 17. “Saddam’s Lion Cubs” is for 12- and 13-year-olds. The Cubs have been given paramilitary training and “Friends of Saddam” cards, and go on to serve in the Fedayeen Saddam militia run by Hussein’s son Uday.

At the top of the hierarchy is Hussein, who over the years converted the political party into an organization that helps enforce his own cult of personality.

“The party is accused of being a dictator party,” said Sayed Nassar, an Egyptian freelance journalist who knew Hussein while the Iraqi leader was a political exile in Egypt during the early 1960s. “It has to be. How else can you rule a country with six different ethnic and religious sects?”

The Baath Party was not conceived as a security organization. Its ideology was born of centuries of occupation of Arab lands, first by the Ottoman Empire, then the British and French. The party was developed more than half a century ago by Michel Aflak, a Syrian Christian, and Salah Bitar, a Syrian Muslim, while they were studying at the Sorbonne. It featured a secular philosophy that drew on elements of Nazism and Soviet-style communism while promoting Arab nationalism. Its guiding principles were “unity, freedom and socialism.”

That platform was very popular among young, educated, middle-class Arabs.

“Imagine how charming I found these slogans, especially when supported by Aflak,” said Dhirgham J. Kadhim, a former party member who fled Baghdad in the 1970s and is now a member of the expatriate opposition. “The feeling in the Arab world was that our backwardness was caused by the Ottoman Empire, which was a religious structure. So we were very happy as young students to promote Arabism. We were so happy that Aflak was Christian.”

The group was launched in 1947 in Damascus, Syria, where since 1963 it has been the ruling party. The Iraqi branch was formed in 1954 and by the late 1960s had split from the Syrian wing in a dispute over leadership.

Baathists first seized power in Iraq in 1963 in a coup backed by the military to overthrow Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Qasim, who had overthrown the British-installed monarchy. But with too little experience in government, and too few members, it lost control in a matter of months.

Four years later, after the Arabs’ humiliating defeat to Israel in the 1967 Middle East War, the movement seized power again.

However, it quickly transformed from its principles of pan-Arab unity and classlessness into a tool of repression. In 1979, Hussein took control of the party and in a notorious incident forever transformed the party into an obedient tool of terror.

On July 18 of that year, Hussein called together members of the Revolutionary Command Council and hundreds of other Baath Party leaders. At the gathering in Baghdad, he announced that he had uncovered a coup plot. About 60 party leaders were taken away to be killed. Hussein videotaped the arrests and later had other party members participate in the executions.

“Since then the party became just like any of his security systems,” Kadhim said. “They have to report what they see, they have to act to protect the state, they have to justify what the state says, and anyone who goes off of this path will be killed. That was the end of any ideology.”

Hussein has indeed been flexible with the party’s ideology. After his military was expelled from Kuwait in 1991, he recognized that his people were tired, fearful and turning to religion. So he initiated a religious campaign, one carefully designed to protect his hold on the Muslim public. For example, he put the words Allahu akbar (God is great) on the nation’s flags, using his own handwriting.

If there is one element of the original ideology that Hussein holds dear, it is the notion that as head of the Iraqi Baath Party, he is a pan-Arab leader, a historic figure who holds the promise of a united Arab nation in his hands. For that reason, his old acquaintance, Egyptian journalist Nassar, thinks Hussein will never stop fighting.

“If he took Kuwait and America didn’t stop him, he would have taken the entire gulf,” said Nasser as he sipped a cup of cappuccino in a cafe where he once met Hussein many years ago. “He definitely thinks he is a national hero.”