De-baathification
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The policy of removing Baath party members from Iraqi government positions following the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. uncountable
"From informing the Bush administration that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with flowers to urging a methodical and comprehensive de-Baathification program under which tens of thousands of people lost their jobs through guilt by association, she said, the errors in the exiles' counsel only mounted and multiplied."
Example
More examples"From informing the Bush administration that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with flowers to urging a methodical and comprehensive de-Baathification program under which tens of thousands of people lost their jobs through guilt by association, she said, the errors in the exiles' counsel only mounted and multiplied."
Etymology
From de- + Baath + -ification. Modeled on denazification, a similar concept employed against the conquered Nazi government following the Second World War.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.