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 == 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. 

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