Talk:Discord II: New World Order (Map Game)/@comment-27815744-20181124185638/@comment-27815744-20181125015401

I’m funding a pro government Ba’ath party to undercut support for antigovernment “Ba’athist” terrorists in Iraq.

TBH I doubt many of the kind of people who support the current Ba’ath party, will care which side they pledge their allegiance to. On the surface both are ideologically identical - anti-west Arab strong man nationalism. Both use the same flag, symbology and rhetoric (it should not be obvious that the group is related to the Syrian Ba’ath party - only that is claims to be the true successor of the Ba’ath party).

To the generaly poorly educated supporters of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party the only real difference would be: one is well funded and has political representation within the Government, and the other is a failing terror group.

Senior members of the Iraqi Ba’ath party could even be encouraged to defect looking for political representation - given there is really no chance of them winning the war at this point.

On the point on Ba’athism being seen as Sunni supremacy by Shia in Iraq, this is a much wider problem that needs to be sorted if Iraq is to be stabilised. The fact that Sunnis and Shiites see each other as fundamentally different and opposed is a cause for the majority of conflict in Iraq.

Modern Ba’athism, which promotes Arab unity and secularism, is honestly not a terrible way to deal with this. The Ba’ath party started off majority Shia after all.

While initially the government backed Iraqi Ba’ath party should focus on winning over the Sunni minority, that are the population base of many terror groups, it could later make a slow transition back to secularism, as the Syrian Ba’ath party did.