Yeah, they were totally secular, that's why the sunni arabs lorded it over the vast shia underclass and the kurds, who were AT BEST second class citizens. How many pogroms and ethnic cleansings? How many dead from wars? The entire government was tribal down to it's fucking roots. Government positions and power was distributed according to family bloodlines and tribal alliances.
But I'll give you that the baathists, despite their failings in practice, were much better in every way to the current crop of insane fanatics. Even moreso on paper, but it was achieved as much as theoretical communism was achieved in the USSR.
So do you think this was the desired outcome? Yeah, that's why the US spent thousands of lives and billions of dollars trying to make Iraq a functional state I'm sure, cause they wanted it to fall into chaos. Iraqis started slaughtering each other the minute the iron fist of Saddam was removed. Could it, MAYBE, be explained by religion? No, of course not, the militias ethnically cleansing each other from neighborhoods because that other tribal group thinks that the wrong person became Caliph hundreds of years ago, they couldn't possibly be at fault. The fucking salafists and wahhabists preaching their poisonous bullshit from the Gulf countries and beyond, urging all faithfull to jihad, they're completely irrelevant. The "charitable" muslim organizations, fronts for recruitment and funding all over the muslim, and increasingly western, world, who cares? It's all the fault of those westerners and the evil jews again. Isn't it always.
