Baath Party

(Baathists)

   A transnational Arab party (the Arabic word Baath means "resurrection") founded in Damascus in 1940 by Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Orthodox Christian intellectual, and Salah al-Din Baitar, a Sunni Muslim Syrian intellectual. The party's historic goals were to achieve Arab unity under secularism and socialism. So-called national sections of the party presently rule in Iraq and Syria, but the two sections have long been embittered enemies. The Baath Party briefly came to power in Iraq for nine months in 1963 when it helped to overthrow Abdul Karim Kassem. It resumed power in July 1968 and has held it ever since.

   Saddam Hussein increasingly began to wield power and became the party's leader by 1979. The party's fortunes effectively became those of his and Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, the Baathists made Iraq into a militarily powerful state that was finally able to crush the rebellious Kurds in 1975. To do this, however, Saddam Hussein increasingly used tactics of terror and murder and, against the Kurds, genocide, effectively turning Iraq into a police state. Ultimately, the Baathists under Saddam Hussein overreached themselves militarily in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the Gulf War of 1991 against the United States and its allies following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Although technically abolished by the occupying U.S. forces in 2003 and their leadership largely eliminated, Baathist remnants continue to exist in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. However, they play only a minor role in events, given the Shiite rise to power as well as many other contending groups.