Word: baath
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...Colonel Munzer Wandari, a fiercely mustachioed fanatic who personally took up a jet fighter and strafed the presidential palace with rockets. When the moderates called on the army for help, troops cleared the streets and jailed Wandari. But he had apparently made his point. An emergency meeting of the Baath high command decided upon a plague-on-both-your-houses gesture: Shabib, Jawad and five aides were hustled into another plane and sent into exile too-in Beirut. Strangely silent in the uproar was the one non-Baathist in a position of power, Iraq's President Abdul Salam Aref...
Until party elections are held some time next year, Iraq will apparently be run by the Baath Central Committee (which includes a Jordanian, a Lebanese and a Kuwaiti as well as Iraqi and Syrian generals) and by Michel Aflak, the Secretary-General and real power in the party. It was the first time that Aflak, a withdrawn, seemingly gentle intellectual who has sanctioned the executions of hundreds of political opponents, emerged from his shadowy position behind the scenes...
National Families. What precisely is Baath? Nasser seems to consider it an even greater threat than his old enemies, the Arab monarchies of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and complains: "I have read every book by or about Baath and I could understand nothing." A Western diplomat describes it as an "Arab Cosa Nostra." On the contrary, one knowledgeable observer thinks Baath "is probably ahead of its time-reformist, progressive and secular in a world of Arabs bound by tradition, religion and narrow, personal interest...
Founder Aflak, 53, whose scholarly manner has won him the nickname "The Professor," defines Baath through his career as much as through his words. Born in Damascus to the Greek Orthodox faith in an overwhelmingly Moslem environment (Aflak's father was a moderately successful grain merchant, and his mother, now 75, is still illiterate), Aflak got honors in history at the Sorbonne. In Paris he argued politics with other Afro-Asian students, read Marx, Nietzsche and Jefferson. He says, "I quickly found Marxism inadequate, based on materialism without human and spiritual values, without national consciousness. Nations are only large...
...like himself, were overeducated, underemployed sons of peasants and workers. The luminous classical Arabic of his political tracts fills Baathists with ecstasy, but in translation, his ideas seem rather murky: "Nationalism is love before everything else"; "Revolution is the opposition of truth to the existing situation." Aflak wrote Baath's democratic-sounding constitution in five days, and it has never been changed or, for that matter, implemented...