The Ba'athist government collapsed in November 1963 over the question of unification with Syria (where a rival branch of the Ba'ath Party had seized power in March) and the extremist and uncontrollable behavior of al-Sa'di's National Guard. President Arif, with the overwhelming support of the Iraqi military, purged Ba'athists from the government and ordered the National Guard to stand down; although al-Bakr had conspired with Arif to remove al-Sa'di, on January 5, 1964, Arif removed al-Bakr from his new position as Vice President, fearful of allowing the Ba'ath Party to retain a foothold inside his government.[56] Throughout the Party's brief time in power, British and Israeli officials as well as the representatives of Western oil companies were generally skeptical of the Ba'ath, but U.S. officials including ambassador Robert C. Strong had what Wolfe-Hunnicutt characterizes as a "romantic" conception of the Ba'athist ability to modernize Iraq, and attributed reports of the National Guard's cruelty and fanaticism to what Lakeland dubbed "the well‐known Arab tendency to exaggerate." After the November coup, however, mounting evidence of Ba'athist atrocities emerged, and Lakeland authored "a devastating postmortem on the Ba'athist regime" in which he concluded: "The popular revulsion against the Ba'ath for this particular reason is largely justified, and therefore will have a more or less permanent effect on the political developments in the country—particularly on the prospects of a Ba'athi revival."[57] Similarly, the Slugletts describe the Ba'athists as having cultivated a "profoundly unsavory image" through "acts of wanton brutality" on a scale without prior precedent in Iraq, including "some of the most terrible scenes of violence hitherto experienced in the postwar Middle East": "As almost every family in Baghdad was affected—and both men and women were equally maltreated—the Ba'athists' activities aroused a degree of intense loathing for them that has persisted to this day among many Iraqis of that generation."[58]