Does anyone know if your spouse/fiance' is iraqi and was apart of ...

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the Baathist party if that will cause all kinds of problems considering to get a decent job in Iraq it was almost required?

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I thought they just passed a new law reconciling with former Baathist's.

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I thought they just passed a new law reconciling with former Baathist's.

yeah partially, they can now be a part of government in Iraq but what does that mean for who they let in the USA?? Especially, when the person who is in the party is also a Shiite?

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Wow a Shiite Baathist! I didn't know that was allowed. I do not know the answer?

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Oh yeah it was allowed check out this article.

Baathist secrets revealed

Joel Brinkley

Sunday, August 19, 2007

IT GOES without saying that President Bush invaded Iraq knowing almost nothing about the nation and society he would soon own.

Do you recall Bush saying anything about the challenge, for example, of keeping peace between Sunnis and Shiites? The closest he came to that, in a press release issued days before the war began, was this: "All the Iraqi people - its rich mix of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans and all others - should enjoy freedom, prosperity and equality in a unified country."

So much for that idea.

When Bush embraced Nouri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq's prime minister, did he say anything about Dawa, Maliki's political party? Hezbollah in Lebanon is an offshoot of Dawa, and the two Shiite groups still have connections. Hezbollah, of course, started the war with Israel last summer and has long been on the American list of terrorist organizations. Dawa was on that list in the 1980s.

Well, here's a new piece of knowledge about Iraq, gleaned from records of the Baath Party, which was Saddam Hussein's political base. The Bush administration could not possibly have known this. But then, it should have realized that Iraq offered a rich stew of political and military rivalries and contradictions. Just imagine how an Iraqi leader might fare if suddenly he was placed in charge of San Francisco, or New York City, with little if any know-ledge of the cities' history or politics.

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi American author and academic, is the official custodian of 2.5 million pages of records taken from the Baath Party's headquarters. He came upon them in the rubble just after the American invasion in 2003. The records document the party's malignant work over a decade or two. And from that, Makiya has drawn an incendiary new conclusion.

The Baath Party was not just Hussein's political base. It was also one limb of a three-branch security force that kept Iraqis cowed. The other two were the army and the Mukhabarat secret service.

I happened to meet Makiya during a reporting tour in Iraq at the end of 2003. I had a look at some of the documents. They offered a vivid picture of treachery, deceit and horrific brutality. Among the documents were stacks of ledgers, each one 2-by-3 feet wide. They listed everyone in the nation and judged them on various ideological criteria, such as their position on the "Mother of all Battles" (the Persian Gulf War), whether the individual was a friend of the president or held Baath Party membership.

Now, five years later, Makiya has completed a study of these ledgers. He made the surprising finding that most everyone who lives in Sadr City, a militant Shiite Baghdad neighborhood, was, before the war, a card-carrying member of the Baath Party.

What does that mean? Remember, the Baath Party helped cement Sunni control. Party enforcers, for example, rounded up army deserters and sliced off their ears, then cut off all food rations to their families. Shiites were generally the victims.

Iraqis here and there joined the party to help get a job. But for an entire Shiite neighborhood to join Makiya, argues that there has to be another explanation. Sadr City is the political base for Muqtada al-Sadr, the incendiary young cleric who leads the largest and most militant of Iraq's private militia's, the Mahdi Army. He is the son of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the predecessor to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential figure among the Shiites.

You may recall that Shiites in southern Iraq tried to stage an uprising just after the Persian Gulf War, and in response Hussein razed villages and slaughtered thousands of people. With southern Iraq in disarray, Hussein asked Sadiq al-Sadr to restore order. It was the sort of request one could not refuse.

Over the years, a Baathist enforcement army took form beneath him. No precise records have come to light, but it seems unlikely that Sadr controlled it directly. He grew restive in this role, and in 1999 Hussein assassinated him. But his force lived on - and eventually became the Mahdi Army. Sadr City is named for him.

Then comes the American invasion - and the insurrection. I often wondered how the Shiite militias - the victimized underclass for decades - so readily adopted the sort of vicious brutality that had long been the specialty of the Saddam's Sunni enforcers.

"It is ubiquitous Baath-style violence," Makiya explains. "The beheadings, the mutilation: The Baathists loved these gruesome spectacles, and now these displays are their fingerprints."

This bit of knowledge certainly complicates the question of de-Baathification. And what does it have to say about Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been Maliki's most important parliamentary ally? Sadr commands a "Baathist" militia.

How little we knew in 2003. How many surprises are left?

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...9/ED7IRK08D.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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*bump*

[S and S 12]

It shouldn't be a problem. The US government knows many people had no choice if they wanted to work or go to college. A rather large percentage of Iraqis were in the ba'ath party. I think they would only be concerned if the person is a higher level member.