the Ba`th Party: our Arab curse

Yesterday, while doing my 80 laps in the pool, I was fuming.  I was thinking about the horrible legacy and impact of this horrific Ba`th party.  I don't think (unlike the silly thesis of Kanan Makiyya in his book Republic of Fear) that a sentence in one article of Aflaq was the problem.  The Ba`th in power is the problem: in both Syria and Iraq. I can't think of one positive achievement of this lousy party in power in either country.  I was re-reading yesterday morning Ghassan Sharbil's Saddam Marra Min Huna and could not think that we really have been afflicted by this bloody, massacring party.  I can think of many domestic achievements of Nasser (and a measure of self-respect in foreign policy) of the Nasser regime, despite my criticisms.  But I can't for the life of me think of one achievement of the Ba`th party.  I also blame it mightily for the 1967 war in how they pushed Nasser (although Nasser and the Zionist Hashemites have to be blamed to, of course).  But what the Ba`th Party has done in both Syria and Iraq, and in the Arab world at large, is nothing short of criminal--on a mass scale.