Well let's look at Russia:
The Putin years have witnessed a steady sanitizing of Soviet history. Hence the attempted rehabilitation of Iron Felix. Or the treatment of Stalin on the 50th anniversary of his death in March 2003. Or Putin's celebration of the late Yuri Andropov, the "Butcher of Budapest," on Andropov's 90th birthday in June 2004.
The old guard is nostalgic and making sure the entire country thinks of the gulag era as the good old days:
What does this portend for Russia's future? Nothing positive. A country that sugarcoats its bloody totalitarian past will never be a true friend of America and the West. Moreover, a country that fails to atone for a shameful history threatens to repeat that history. Figes was right: The ghosts of 1917 aren't dead.
And why should this matter to the disbanding of the Iraqi army? Because we might have avoided an uprising at the price of the Baathists believing they could get right back in the saddle again after we left by playing along and pretending to be good little post-Saddam Baathists. Iraq could never be a good friend of the US with Baathists in power. They would surely have repeated their history and our invasion and sacrifice would have been for nothing. And this is to say nothing of the moral duty we owe the Shias and Kurds to give them a chance to build a free Iraq.
But most worrisome about the idea that we should have cut a deal with the old guard is what would have happened during the Fallujah uprising in April. We saw what our tame Baathists did in Fallujah. They ran and turned the city over to the enemy. What would the entire army have done if it was still in the field? We could have had our Sepoy Mutiny right then and there instead of the narrowly based insurgency we are fighting and beating now.
We are right to kill the ghosts of the Saddam era.
