Basra, Iraq - Its tentacles were everywhere, its spies ubiquitous, its threats thinly veiled and its celebration of one man, Saddam Hussein, adulatory. It controlled schools, hospitals, the police, the army, the oil industry, hotels, the courts - indeed, almost every facet of Iraqi life. For it, children spied on parents, wives on husbands, sisters on brothers. For three decades, the Baath Party permeated Iraqi society to a degree similar to the Nazis in Germany and communists in China during the Cultural Revolution. It tortured and murdered its opponents, real and imagined, sought to exterminate whole ethnic groups, and eviscerated...