“Too Soft”: America’s Failure to Learn from Germany in Iraq

“By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.” Such a warning from a local CIA station chief would cause most policymakers to reconsider their course of action. And yet, the U.S. authorities in Iraq ignored it, pressing ahead with their plan to remove members of the Baath party from positions of power.

In order to craft a de-Baathification process following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the United States adopted policies that it claimed were based heavily on the denazification policies enacted in the American-occupied zone of West Germany to achieve the same goal. Members of the George W. Bush administration relied heavily on the analogy between the Baath and Nazi regimes and used this as part of their justification for both the invasion itself and the shape of their policies in the aftermath. Despite this, however, the de-Baathification program was badly thought out and badly implemented, proving to be hugely counterproductive for the security and prosperity of post-war Iraq — the United States neither replicated the successes nor avoided the mistakes of denazification.

The reason for this was not that nobody had done the research. On the contrary, the State Department and the CIA had, and their recommendations showed that they had understood the lessons of the German case — that removing every member of the party was unrealistic and would be severely detrimental to the operation of new state institutions. The problem was that they were ignored by the Department of Defense and the White House, who viewed their regional experts as “too soft” to properly remake Iraq. Those who were ultimately responsible for the failures of de-Baathification allowed bureaucratic infighting and overconfidence to undermine the goal of a peaceful and democratic Iraq. While de-Baathification may still have not achieved its goals had the German case been better taken into account, particularly given the myriad ethnic, religious, and political schisms that rocked Iraq following the end of the Baath regime, the Department of Defense missed opportunities to avoid mistakes that had already been made in the 1940s. The lessons from history had been learned — just not by the right people.

The Analogy

The reconstruction of West Germany and Japan following the end of World War II had become the epitome of success in post-conflict nation-building within American circles, and some American officials had hoped to replicate these successes from very early on in the planning stages of the Iraq invasion. Both Bush and senior figures in his administration also directly used analogies between Baath Iraq and Nazi Germany. In a speech in May 2003, shortly after the American intervention began, Bush drew directly on this: “Some believe that democracy in the Middle East is unlikely, if not impossible. … These same arguments have been heard before in other times, about other people. After World War II, many doubted that Germany and Japan, with their histories of autocratic rule and aggressive armies, could ever function as free and peaceful societies.”

Paul Bremer, the architect of de-Baathification, also explicitly made the connection in his memoirs: “I thought it was absolutely essential to make it clear that the Ba’athist ideology … had to be extirpated finally and completely from society, much as the American government decided to completely extirpate Nazism from Germany at the end of the Second World War.”

On the face of it, the analogy seemed apposite. In both cases, the United States aimed to remove an authoritarian regime that had committed considerable crimes against humanity, replacing it with a friendly liberal-democratic government. The Nazi and Baath parties had a similar structure, with a wide membership based on the associated privileges of belonging and a small inner circle of highly placed members running the party. Charles-Phillipe David and Karine Premont arguethat the analogy was a logical choice given U.S. predispositions — World War II was a point of reference close to the hearts of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, and the U.S. success at nation-building in Germany was precisely the kind of positive example needed in order to muster public support for what was, in essence, a war of choice.

Other scholars inject notes of skepticism. Thomas Maulucci argues that the German example was predominantly used as an excuse to “give the impression that an occupation strategy had been thought out.” Aysegul Zeren contends that the United States used the analogy disingenuously in order to ensure that “getting rid of the Baathists became as morally right as getting rid of the Nazis.” And Thomas Ricks points out that the analogy gave the Bush administration a tactical advantage in that anyone opposing their Iraq policies could be painted as “the moral equivalent of Neville Chamberlain: fools at best, knaves at worst.”

The Implementation: Denazification

After the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, the Allies and the German people faced the arduous task of rebuilding Germany while eradicating Nazism. The initial phase of denazification focused on dissolving Nazi organizations, dismissing Nazis from administrative roles, and interning potential war criminals. However, it was difficult to ascertain the extent to which many individuals had collaborated with the Nazi regime. Large parts of the population had been forced to support the Nazi war effort, including through property confiscations and mandatory conscription, and these people could all therefore be charged with collaboration in some form or another. Although many had clearly attempted to benefit from their dealings with the Nazi regime, many others had understandably concluded that collaboration was the only way to survive. Determining the extent of a person’s involvement was made harder by the lack of reliable documentation, as countless files and party membership lists had been destroyed during the war.

The U.S. military government thus decided to generate its own information through the Fragebogen, detailed 131-point questionnaires intended to identify the career and party membership details of every adult living in the U.S.-controlled zone. Special Branch personnel would use these to assign each individual to one of five classes, from major offenders (class I) to the exonerated (class V). However, over 45 million people had been involved in some way with the Nazi party or its affiliated organizations, and there was no guarantee that they would tell the truth about their participation. Those with money or influence could avoid submitting their questionnaire, while those in minor roles who dutifully completed it lost their jobs. This led to a widespread feeling among the German population that the United States was concentrating too much on eliminating small fry and not on punishing those who had committed serious crimes.

The implementation of denazification became increasingly lax, reflecting a growing view that the complete elimination of all former Nazis from professional life was unrealistic. The original idea had been that there would be enough non-Nazi personnel available in Germany to staff public offices. However, the reality was that most of these people had died or fled during the war, or were too weak to work following their suffering under the Nazi regime. The remaining healthy individuals started filling posts that they had no expertise in, while minor collaborators with skills and experience were dismissed. A spate of amnesties followed, and the denazification program was formally ended in March 1948. In May 1951, the Bundestag went further, adopting a law on the reintegration of Nazi officials into the civil service under Article 131 of the German constitution — all those who had lost their jobs, apart from major offenders and Gestapo agents, gained the right not only to be reemployed, but also to claim back pay for the time they had not been able to work. As John Herz aptly summarizes, “The process that had begun with wholesale incriminations turned in the direction of wholesale exemptions and then ended in wholesale exonerations.”

The Implementation: De-Baathification

De-Baathification was first discussed in depth during the Future of Iraq Project, which ran from July 2002 to April 2003 and produced a report on the issues that the United States might face following a potential invasion of Iraq. Informed by this study, coupled with analysis of the German experience, the State Department and CIA advocated a de-Baathification policy that focused on eliminating only those at the very top of the command structure, or those who had committed crimes. This approach was summed up in an internal memo to Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2002:

We should preclude only a small number of the members of the old regime — the upper echelons of the Baath party, the military, and the security services, as well as any indicted war criminals — from participating in the post-Saddam political order. We will most likely need the assistance of many associated in some way with the old regime to maintain order and establish a new viable state. Careful screening of potential leaders, however, is essential to maintain the credibility of any successor government, as are transitional justice arrangements to ensure accountability for past actions.

However, the Department of Defense thought that the State Department’s regional experts were “too soft” to remake Iraq, and instead demanded a broader purge with a prohibition on any former party member holding a government post. In December 2002, the department’s Office of Special Plans drafted National Security Presidential Directive 24, which handed control of post-war Iraq to the Department of Defense and tasked de-Baathification to the newly created Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. With no written policy to guide him, and without access via the Department of Defense to any of the post-war planning documents prepared by the CIA or State Department, Garner began to implement a pragmatic and incremental de-Baathification process, but he was hobbled by the lack of time and resources available to him. He began his job only two months before the invasion concluded, and the Department of Defense insisted that he only employ staff who were “politically acceptable” (i.e., not from the State Department).

In April 2003, the Department of Defense replaced the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs with the Coalition Provisional Authority, a temporary body that was responsible for government administration, de-Baathification, and reforming the armed forces. Shortly afterward, Garner was abruptly replaced by Bremer. A few days after he arrived in Baghdad in May, Bremer issued Order No. 1: De-Baathification of Iraqi Society, which removed all full members of the Baath party from public sector posts and banned them from future employment in government. Bremer claimed this would apply to around 15,000 people, but over the next 18 months more than 30,000 party members were summarily removed from their posts. Later in May, Bremer issued Order No. 2: Dissolution of Entities, which dissolved all parts of the armed forces, security services, and related administrative departments — with all employees dismissed.

In August of that year, the provisional Iraqi government set up the Higher National De-Baathification Commission under the chairmanship of Ahmed Chalabi, a former exile and ardent proponent of de-Baathification who had vocally supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein and wished immediately to extend the scope of the process. Even before Bremer formally handed over control of the implementation of de-Baathification in November, the commission had already issued orders confirming the removal from public office of anyone holding one of the top four ranks of the Baath party. Despite the nominal existence of a two-tiered appeal process, overseen by judges, Chalabi’s directives made it clear that this process was more of a fiction than a fact. The commission was widely criticized as secretive, manipulative, and overly powerful: There was no transparency in its decisions, its documents were not available to outsiders, and nobody had the power to assess its work.

Bremer did not consider that the skills and experience of Baath party members made them useful in achieving U.S. goals, and he outright ignored the recommendation from the State Department to temper de-Baathification in order to smooth the transition: “Although distasteful, success often requires compromise with individuals associated with the previous regime. … [they can] be harnessed to support reconstruction, maintain order, offer important local knowledge, and act as a source of continuity between past and future.”

The blanket purge of the civil service under Order No. 1, on the basis of party rank rather than individual deeds, denuded Iraq’s public institutions of experienced personnel. The assumption was that the party elite could not have achieved their high rank without either being corrupt or committing acts that violated human rights. However, the 30,000 people removed from their posts under the order did not just comprise the very top of the chain of command. Those who lost their jobs included those who had been forced to join the party to keep their jobs or get promotions, such as teachers, doctors, and scientists, as well as those experienced in the bureaucracy of running the Iraqi state — effectively paralyzing public institutions and wasting the experience and skills of thousands of people who could have assisted in rebuilding their country. As the local CIA station chief warned Bremer just before the order was made: “By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Ba’athists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.”

The dismantling of the Iraqi army and intelligence services under Order No. 2 caused huge security problems, creating a class of disenfranchised leaders, and the wider dissolution of the army gave them their rank-and-file members. The army had collapsed and scattered after the U.S. invasion, and reordering it to serve a positive function in the new Iraqi state would have required considerable vetting, particularly of its officer corps. However, simply getting rid of it entirely missed a huge opportunity to help restore order and ease the transition to a post-Baath government — as identified in the Future of Iraq Project. The department had originally intended to take existing units, remove high-level Baathists, and put them to work as part of reconstruction efforts — however, Bremer had put his own plan into action instead. He mistakenly assumed that one could not be a senior officer without being a party member, but later learned that even some top generals were not in the party.

The Lessons Not Learned

Much of the failure to learn the lessons of history for the de-Baathification program was due to the fact that the in-depth research that had been done by the State Department and the CIA prior to the invasion was ignored or dismissed by the Department of Defense, and experienced State Department staff were removed or overlooked due to bureaucratic infighting. Both the White House and the Defense Department had the ability to access research and planning from a wide range of government and academic sources, some of it very specifically focused on how to replicate the successes of the German case. However, once the Department of Defense was given responsibility for de-Baathification, there was no attempt to take a data-driven approach to the design or enactment of the program, nor to learn the lessons of previous U.S. interventions. Garner was not given access to this research nor to experienced non-department staff who could have helped him to implement it — Bremer, on the other hand, actively chose to ignore it.

Despite the widespread employment of the analogy with Germany, the Department of Defense failed to accurately apply the sometimes awkward lessons of denazification in designing their de-Baathification program. The research was done, and the right people were available to assist, but the Department of Defense allowed bureaucratic infighting and overconfidence to undermine its approach — meaning that the United States forged ahead in remaking Iraq without the benefit of the lessons from the denazification case. The White House and the Department of Defense were happy to use history for simplistic and cosmetic justification of their policies, but not to use the historical work of the CIA and State Department to better shape how de-Baathification worked on the ground, to the detriment of the Iraqi people.

Emma Salisbury, Ph.D., is an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and an associate fellow at the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre.

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