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Amb. Feisel al-Istrabadi at the United Nations.

Foreign Policy: Iraq’s Parliament just passed the Accountability and Justice Act, the official aim of which is to let former officials from the Baath Party back into the government. Do you think it’s a serious step toward political reconciliation?

Amb. Feisal al-Istrabadi: What happened was that Iraqis realized that the de-Baathification order that was promulgated by Amb. Paul Bremer during his term as the civil administrator of Iraq was overly broad as drafted, and much more overly broad as applied. It captured a large number of people who were innocent of any wrongdoing by any objective measure and were deprived of the ability to earn a living and support their families. The current law attempts to, at least on its face, reverse this trend. In theory, yes, it should be a positive step toward reconciliation. But of course how the law is applied becomes extremely important.

FP: The U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that the Iraqi government hasn’t spent much money on reconstruction projects, in part because it doesn’t have the technical capacity to do so. Is the hope that the new de-Baathification law will remedy this skills deficit?

FI: We have this deficit because Paul Bremer threw out administrators at multiple levels from hospitals, schools... forget about the ministries. The consequence of that has been that we lost a lot of technocrats. A lot of people who know how to make the trains run on time have been forced to live at home without any pensions over the last five years. You have to remember, the public sector in Iraq is much wider than it is in the United States, particularly after the sanctions. Everybody’s in the public sector. If you’re a teacher, you’re in the public sector; if you’re a professor, you’re in the public sector; if you’re a bank employee, you’re in the public sector. When Bremer says, “All we said is that they couldn’t work in the public sector”—there is no private sector! There are no private banks in Iraq; there are no private universities in Iraq; there are no private elementary schools in Iraq; there are no private hospitals in Iraq. They’re all public.

FP: When you want to bring skilled people back into the government, how do you tell a good Baathist from a bad Baathist?

FI: You’re talking about destroying people’s careers, destroying their lives, and destroying their ability to earn a living. So if you’re going to err, you have to err on the side of caution. The standard ought to be whether you can establish to some reasonable degree of certitude that the individual has engaged in some culpable behavior. Mere membership in the organization cannot be culpable behavior, because we know that the overwhelming majority of those who joined the Baath party were, in one way or another, forced to join the party. There has to be a forum for that to be established; there has to be some sort of at least quasi-judicial proceeding. Unfortunately, Ambassador Bremer’s order failed to take any of that into consideration, and he just wholesale abolished entities with the stroke of his pen, and fed the insurgency directly.

FP: A lot of Sunni Arabs have already criticized this new law, and it passed over Sunni Arab objections in Parliament. Doesn’t that suggest that it didn’t go far enough to alleviate sectarian concerns?

FI: The majority of the members of the Baath party were Shia, but in the manner in which Ambassador Bremer allowed the then-chairman of the de-Baathification comission, Dr. Ahmad Chalabi, to apply the law, a very high proportion of the Shia who were members of the Baath party were allowed to continue to function in their positions. The burden of being removed from office fell disproportionately highly on Sunnis, to the extent that the Sunnis of Iraq began to call it “de-Sunnification” rather than de-Ba’athification. So I understand if there is some skepticism on their part.

FP: You mentioned the need for a higher standard of evidence when someone gets purged for being a high-ranking Baathist. The new law requires judicial review in de-Baathification cases. Is Iraq’s judicial system up to the task?

FI: One of the great surprises I found when I returned after more than three decades in exile was that the regular judiciary, although it had problems, had survived with its integrity intact. That’s why Saddam Hussein created a series of special or exceptional courts, outside the normal judiciary—because he wasn’t able sufficiently to manipulate the regular judiciary into doing his bidding. So, the judiciary, by and large, is probably perceived as being relatively independent and capable. The key is to ensure that the political class does not attempt to influence decisions of the judges.