ERIC DAVIS:
Because I think one has to conceptualize the Baath Party in the 1990s more as organized crime than as actually a political party. And I think the only reason that most of the people in the Baath Party remain loyal to Saddam and his two sons were the fact that they were able to distribute certain resources to them.
I think it's going to be much more difficult because Saddam and his sons held a very, very tight rein on those resources for other members in that top 55, for example, and certainly for lower echelon Baathist leaders, to be able to gain access to that money and to be able to distribute it.
And once they're unable to distribute that, we're going to find that the level of violence against American troops is going to diminish seriously. And if we can make the Sunni Arabs aware of the fact that they're not going to be discriminated in the new government, in the new country, in the new structure of Iraq, unlike the situation prior to Saddam's overthrow where they controlled the country, then I think that's also going to contribute significantly to the decline of violence in Iraq and make the process of a democratic transition work much better.
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