WASHINGTON: US authorities recently appointed former Baath Party leaders to help rebuild Iraq. Shortly afterward, Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that senior Baath Party members would not be allowed to retain positions of authority in the new Iraqi administration.

The assumption is that, in time, people will step forward, identify appointees who were Baath Party members and those appointees will be removed. There are risks in such assumptions.

At the end of World War II, in a similar effort to rebuild a defeated enemy country, US officials released Nazi Party members from prison. These were men convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and at trials 65 miles south at Dachau. Nearly 2,000 officers, guards and other Nazi administrators were freed and allowed to return to their families and jobs.

Hanging Germans, US officials reasoned, did nothing to win Germany’s support in a united front against the new enemy — the Soviet Union — and besides, these men were needed to rebuild Germany. Why waste that knowledge and manpower behind bars?

To legitimize what was in essence a betrayal of justice, the US government instituted a programme of “de-Nazification”: the condemned Nazis were made to fill out a form, pay a fine, then sent home. In Iraq today, that programme is called “de- Baathification.”

Strenuous objections were raised against the freeing of Nazi war criminals. William Denson, chief prosecutor in the Dachau trials, argued that by their behaviour the condemned Nazis had “forfeited their right to walk in civilized society.” He was reprimanded for his insubordination and excused from further duty. Obviously, he had failed to see the wisdom in allowing former Nazis to take part in democratizing their nation.

Senior Baath Party members whom US officials consciously or inadvertently return to office may not have run concentration camps. They did, nonetheless, wilfully aid, abet and participate in a criminal regime that subjected human beings to killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities — the same violations of international law for which Nazi concentration camp guards were found guilty at Dachau.

By voluntarily supporting the Baath Party’s crimes, The Hague and Geneva conventions view these officials as participants in those crimes.

According to reports, Rumsfeld said it was possible that “Iraqis installed in official jobs could be removed” if a subsequent review found they had been senior Baath Party members.

While marginally reassuring, implicit in the “possible” removal of Baath officials is the disconcerting possibility that they may be allowed to remain. Whatever their history, why waste that knowledge and manpower behind bars?

It would be neither difficult nor time-consuming to establish review committees comprised of Iraqis who could vet appointees before the fact. Not implementing such precautionary measures sends a message from the Bush administration to the community of nations: If having invaded Iraq we must now help rebuild Iraq, we will do so as expediently as possible.

And there lies the real risk in such precipitous appointments. Every time the government compromises the democracy it purports to defend, democracy’s foundations erode a little more. The detention of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the infamous McCarthy black list, the freeing of Nazi criminals in the late 1940s, the appointment of Saddam Hussein’s supporters — each compromise blurs the line between democracy as the core of civilization and democracy as a disposable tool of politics.

Better that the US administration take greater care and more time to help rebuild Iraq than that the seeds of Iraq’s undoing be again allowed to sprout in government soil.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post-The Baltimore Sun.