The roots of Ba'athism

The programme was called 'The Road to 9/11', not 'The Roots of 9/11' as I said before. Anyway, I videotaped it when it was repeated. The preview in the Radio Times said 'It's not quite of the calibre of  [..] The Power of Nightmares'. It's much better than that, since it does not have the fundamental dishonesty of the 'Nightmares'.

One of the points it makes is pretty much the same as the one made here ( Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East, Bernard Lewis, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005):

[Following the fall of France in 1940] Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, who moved in and made it the main base of their propaganda and activity in the Arab world.

It was at that time that the ideological foundations of what later became the Baath Party were laid, with the adaptation of Nazi ideas and methods to the Middle Eastern situation. The nascent party's ideology emphasized pan-Arabism, nationalism, and a form of socialism. The party was not officially founded until April 1947, but memoirs of the time and other sources show that the Nazi interlude is where it began.
[..]
In the years that followed the end of World War II, the British and the French departed, and after a brief interval the Soviets moved in.

The leaders of the Baath Party easily switched from the Nazi model to the communist model, needing only minor adjustments.

Oh no. America created Saddam Hussein. And Osama Bin Laden. Not to mention the Egyptian dictatorship.

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The latest on the Andijan trial, from the BBC. Muidin Sobirov, accused of being a key planner behind the uprising, confessed to his role:

All the details of his account exactly match those of the government's version of events, already given by the state prosecution and widely published in the state-controlled media. [..] Mr Sobirov spoke rapidly without pauses, frequently looking at the ceiling, as if repeating details memorised beforehand.

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