Ba'ath Party

Arab political party and movement that promotes a mixed ideology of Arabic unionism, anticolonial struggle, and socialism. The Ba'ath Party—ba'ath is Arabic for renaissance—currently dominates Syrian politics and was the most powerful party in Iraq until the 2003 overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was secretary-general of the Ba'ath Party in Iraq.

The constitution of the Ba'ath Party asserts that “the Arabs form one nation [which] has the natural right to live in a single state and to be free to direct its own destiny.” The party maintains branches in some of the other Arab countries in the Middle East but does not wield much influence in their internal politics.

Since its inception in the early 1940s, Ba'ath Party ideology has rested on three principles: unity, freedom, and socialism. The first principle, unity, speaks to the party's desire to see the entire Arab community (22 countries currently comprising about 280 million people) come together in a united Arab state. The second principle, freedom, refers to the party's belief that Arabs cannot and should not be led or dominated by foreigners. The Ba'ath believe that “colonialism and all that goes with it is a criminal enterprise.”

The third principle of Ba'ath ideology, socialism, refers to a general belief in social and economic equality rather than socialism in the conventional political and economic senses of the word. The party's founders rejected both Marxism and communism, the latter primarily due to its political monopolization by the Soviet Union. In recent years, Syria has taken active steps to stimulate private enterprise after decades of government monopoly of the country's key industries. Thus, the only remaining state led by the Ba'ath Party seems to be pushing socialism even further into the background.

The Ba'ath Party was founded by three French-educated Arab intellectuals in the early 1940s in the Syrian capital of Damascus. The party's pan-Arabic ideology began to spread outside of Syria after 1948, when the establishment of the state of Israel was attributed, in part, to the lack of Arab unity. In 1953, the Ba'ath Party merged with the Syrian Socialist Party to form the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party. This party became active in Iraq the following year, and, in 1968, it took over that country's government.

Under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Ba'ath Party membership reached an estimated 2.4 million Iraqis. However, its ranks were largely confined to Iraq's minority Sunni Muslim population. Wary of losing power to the majority Shi' a Muslims, Saddam used the Iraqi Ba'ath Party as an instrument of repression against his political opponents. Following the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Hussein's Ba'ath Party was outlawed by the victorious coalition and the party's former members were banned from all government and military positions. This latter policy was abandoned in April 2004 due to a dire necessity for skilled professionals.

The Ba'ath Party is presently the governing party of Syria, with an estimated membership of more than 1 million people in that country. The party's secretary-general, Bashar al-Assad, is also Syria's president. He remains firmly in control of Syria's internal and external politics. Among the most controversial of Assad's policies is Syria's military occupation and political [Page 60]domination of its neighbor, Lebanon. The United States has named Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism and claims that Assad, in association with Iran, secretly funds the anti-Israeli terrorist group known as Hezbollah. The United States has also accused Syria of serving as a base for foreign terrorists supporting the postwar insurgency in Iraq. These many areas of contention have raised concerns about the possibility of war between the United States and the current Syrian government.

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