It tickles my brain in a strange way that the Americans did such a pissweak job of de-nazification after WWII (deliberately so in many ways) and it worked out great for the empire.
But after toppling Saddam, they did a much better job of removing every member of the Ba’ath party from civilian and military power, and it turned into a disaster.
I’ve been turning it over it my head, what was incompetence, what was deliberate, how these two distinct yet similar events played out. Was it simply a matter of the management of empire becoming less competent over time? Would full denazification have caused similar issues in postwar Germany (the experience of the GDR suggests not)?
Very interesting to think about.
Even before they purged their left wing, the Ba’ath party was never socialist.
They were at best Nazbols. They were huge fans of the actual Nazis and explicitly anti-Marx from the very beginning. Their leadership were well versed in Leninist theory, but they were much more interested in using it as a blueprint to build a successful revolutionary movement and disagreed with the goals of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat or building communism. They wanted to use a Leninist approach to seize power, expel the French (hot) then establish an Arab ethnostate (cringe). They translated and distributed a lot of Nazi literature, and before they’d seized power, in the 30s, they wrote to Hitler begging for aid in liberating them from the French. They never wrote to Stalin.