Three Years, Few Regrets

Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya on what's gone right and wrong, and what the possibilities are, on the third anniversary of Saddam Hussein's fall

Michael Young | April 6, 2006

p> em>In two much-lauded works, a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520214390/reasonmagazineA/"> /a> /em> Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World , Kanan Makiya provided, perhaps more than any other writer in English, intellectual ammunition for those opposed to the savagery of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime. Though Makiya has since been accused by many an Arab or Arab-American publicist of being Washington's stooge, his early political career began as a militant in the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which he left in the mid-1970s). His disillusionment with his onetime comrades was most powerfully expressed in Cruelty and Silence , a two-part book on the cruelties of Ba'athist rule and the silence of Arab intellectuals. ("Those I wrote about all read the second section," he told me, "but not the first one.") In supporting an invasion of Iraq, Makiya took his commitment to democracy a step further, but now faces the uncertain consequences of that effort. Makiya is currently a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, and is founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation. /p>

Reason: The U.S. Army has decided to place captured Iraqi documents on the Internet to be translated by non-experts. As someone who has been collecting such documents for many years, and who now heads the Iraq Memory Foundation, what are your thoughts about this?

Kanan Makiya: I applaud the impulse to open up these dark corners of dictatorship to public scrutiny, but I worry about the privacy implications as regards Iraqi society and individuals. Consider this fairly typical case: A young woman seeking employment in a small factory is forced to commit herself to disclosing to Ba'ath operatives the actions and thoughts of her colleagues. In a regime where speaking ill of the president earned you the death penalty, her collaboration surely led to tragedies. A decade and a half later, this woman may be a wife, mother, and an active member of her community. The unmitigated disclosure of her cooperation with the regime may end up ruining her life. Is she guilty of collaboration? Isn't the revelation of her involvement part of the justice that Iraq needs for closure in the post-Saddam era? These questions can only be resolved in an atmosphere of understanding, accountability, and responsibility by Iraqi society itself. The documents should have been released only after the mechanisms, and laws, regulating disclosure had been established inside Iraq. Unfortunately to this date they have not been. On the contrary the conditions for abuse of the kind of information that is in these documents have increased.

Reason: As a prominent actor pushing for U.S. intervention in Iraq, do you feel you were right?