1/24/2005

In an interview with journalist John Lee Anderson, interim Prime Minister of Iraq Iyad “Allawi said that even before the war, when he had first learned that de-Baathification was being considered for Iraq, he had argued strongly against it. The program, he said, should have been called ‘de-Saddamization’–and limited to Saddam’s loyalists and cronies–because, in his opinion, most Iraqis who were members of the Baath Party during the Saddam years had merely used it as a ‘vehicle to live,’ a means of obtaining and keeping their jobs and other state perks.”

 – Jon Lee Anderson, “A Man of the Shadows,” The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005