BAGHDAD, May 21: The liberal Iraqi National Congress (INC) said on Wednesday that it supported US plans to defer elections for as long as two years because of the continuing power of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Despite the devastation wrought by the invasion and the collapse of the regime, senior INC official Goran Talabani said the party, which had a pre-war membership running into the “millions”, remained the “biggest in Iraq”.

“The most well organized and richest party in Iraq now is still the Baath, until you completely dismantle it,” said Talabani, expressing strong support for the change in coalition policy which saw middle- and high-ranking Baathists barred from public office last week.

He stressed that he did not think the Baath would win any election but was worried it might “work its way into any institutions you build.”

The Baath Party had given orders to its members before the war to go underground and infiltrate other parties in a bid to manipulate anti-British and anti-US sentiment, he said.

“The only way you can build a democratic nation is if you dismantle the effect as well as the machine of the previous regime,” he said pointing to the experience of the transition from communism in eastern Europe. —AFP