Opposing war is good, but not good enough.

• Author: Jabar, Faleh A.

Getting rid of the Ba'th regime in Iraq has been the cause of my life for almost a quarter of a century. Precisely when the United States found in the totalitarian regime a worthy ally to stem the tide of fundamentalist Khomeini forces in 1979, the leftist movement to which I belonged discovered, so belatedly, it was in the jaws of a rapacious Leviathan.

I was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party and the editor of the paper's international and Arab affairs department. I hailed the collapse of the Shah of Iran as a portent of "the end of single-party systems." This did not endear me to the Iraqi government. We got a tip I was blacklisted, and I had to leave in less than six hours! I flew to Beirut on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October 1978 to avoid the horrible fate that thousands of my colleagues had met: torture, rape, or assassination. You had either to be with the Ba'th or you were against it.

For a decade or so, we lived like global underground nomads, changing countries, dialects, names, and passports, fake or otherwise. More than 200,000 Iraqis--mostly intellectuals and professionals from the left, liberal, or Kurdish nationalist currents--crossed the border. The world took no notice. Why should it have? I took solace in the writings of German intellectuals who sought refuge outside beleaguered Europe under the Nazi rule. New vocabulary entered our lexicon: exile, identity, alienation, and angst. These were accentuated by a sense of weightlessness, that unbearable lightness of being. New layers of emigrants inflated our ranks to reach an estimated 3.5 million Iraqis in exile in the late 1990s--the creme of the nation. In London, my last home base, aged liberal politicians from the monarchy socialize with middle-aged leftists or rub shoulders with young disillusioned. Ba'thists who seek asylum, unified by a sense of loss and desperation.

As a young man, Saddam Hussein admired Hitlers system of government. Stalin, and his totalitarian model became Saddams exemplars. Saddam tailored his system along Nazi and Stalinist lines, though it had a number of new features as well. In keeping with Nazi ideals, Iraq's Ba'th system had four main pillars: totalitarian ideology, single-party rule, a command economy (nominally socialist), and firm control over the media and the army.

Unlike the Nazi model, the Ba'th version transformed Iraq's traditional tribes and clans into key state institutions. These groups still survive in rural provinces and...