Stupidity and ignorance The person that wrote parts or all of this article is a raging ignorant moron A complete pile of crud Pan Arabism and Ba athism a branch of Sunni Islam Even the Syrian Ba ath Party would ve had some trouble pulling something like that off Ba ath originated in the philosophy of Michel Aflaq a Syrian Christian and it doesn t have any religious connotations It is a secular ideology Again whoever wrote this whatever their intentions is a flaming pile of human shit As far as socialism the economic policies and those more in general looked more like Stalinism 14 What in the world is this supposed to mean It doesn t even make sense as a sentence Iraqi gays and bisexuals who lived in Iraq in the 1980s 1990s have since reported that a Ba athist crackdown on homosexuality and establishments known to function as gay bars took place in the 1990s There is some speculation this was an attempt to appeal to his populace however a regime that on October 16 2002 produced for itself a 100 turnout and a 100 vote in favour of another 7 years of Saddam Hussein as president seems to have little need to suck up to its people 17 This confuses two concepts First the crackdown on homosexuality WAS probably to get grassroots support The 100 vote was a political maneouvre to self legitimize Different concepts albeit serving a similar purpose Self legitimization is useless without some level of popular support even in a dictatorship How braindead is the person that wrote this Whoever tried to torture the buttons on their keyboard by squirting out this crap well they ve succeeded The buttons are tortured and this is shit All they re doing is weakening their own argument through fallacies Of course Iraq discriminated and still discriminates against homosexuals but it equally discriminates internally against Shiites by Sunnis Sunnis by Shiites Kurds by Arabs Arabs by Kurds and so forth But don t make a farce out of the politics of the area fabricate facts and make correlations where there are none Discrimination is there true it s very severe true but fabricating and exaggerating certain facts only destroys your own argument