so perhaps the best thing we can do is to strive to do the best we can for the greatest number of Iraqis. Just as here, there will likely always be dissatisified people no matter what happens.

In another post, you asked about the roughly 10% of the population who were Ba'ath party members. This is a tough issue, but there is a historical parallel. Following WWII, the official policy in Germany was denazification. Membership in the Nazi party resulted in disqualification from government jobs. Unfortunately, in order to hold many jobs under Hitler, a person had to be a member of the Nazi party. This extended all through government down to the people who ran the power plants and water works. From 1933 through 1945, a high percentage of the skilled managers and workers had to be party member, so what were we to do, throw all of them out only to put amateurs in charge of everything? Eventually, the denazification policy was eased somewhat to take into account a person's responsibility for Nazi atrocities. Those who had no role in the atrocities weren't thrown out of their work.

I suspect a similar thing will end up happening in Iraq. I'm reasonably certain that a significant percentage of the Ba'ath party members took no part in the atrocities committed by Saddam's henchmen. Ultimately, it'll be up to the new Iraqi government to decide, but in the end, those with critical skills will probably be kept in place. There will be a lot of people who'll need to find a new line of work, such as the official minders and rapists. Such is life.

As for the looting, it'll probably peter out in the next few days or so. There's decades of rage that a lot of people need to vent out of their systems, and looting might end up being the least damaging way to release that tension. I heard on the news this morning that some Iraqi medical students went out and recovered a lot of supplies looted from some of the hospitals. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the important stuff gets returned. To date, the looting doesn't appear to have been as severe (or resulted in as many deaths) as the LA riots back in the 1990s.