Dexter Filkins' piece on Kanan Makiya in the NYT Magazine is a must read in the ongoing autopsy of the Iraq catastrophe. It's also a valuable document for an anatomy of intellectual folly--make that human folly--in our time.
Makiya, the courageous, soulful, and gravely misguided Iraqi in exile, wrote two indispensable books about Iraq: one about Saddam Hussein's regime of terror (Republic of Fear), the other about the default of Arab intellectuals (Cruelty and Silence). In the 1990s, he campaigned for American intervention. He was tireless.
He knew that to liberate Iraq he needed a practical champion, and the man he lined up with was Ahmad Chalabi. And playing Trotsky to Chalabi's Lenin, most consequentially after September 11, 2001, the onetime Trotskyist became the public face of an invasion that could now be presented to a panicked America as a kick-start for the dramatic top-to-bottom remaking of the corrupt Arab Middle East.
In this, Kanan Makiya was also deeply, catastrophically, flowers-and-sweets wrong. He was also compelling. I well remember how, at NYU in November 2002, he used his polemical skill to convince George Packer, among others, that the moral case for his go-for-broke expedition into Iraq trumped all the objections raised by myself along with Michael Walzer, Frances Fitzgerald, and Mansour Farhang. (The text of my own talk that night is here.)
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