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

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Reason: You've often been accused of bringing an intellectual's sensibility to Middle Eastern politics, which is a nice way of saying your approach is divorced from reality. How would you respond, given that it is indeed the gunmen and thugs who are dominating in Iraq?

KM: In my books I was more realistic than in my activism. I let my heart run ahead of my head. But I am not ashamed of myself. In politics one must work at the margins of what is possible. I despise politics that begin and end with the lowest common denominator of a situation. A people that has been abused is simultaneously capable of very great and very terrible things; it is our duty, if our point of departure is love for that people, to work on the basis of the very best that this abused population can offer, not the worst.

Reason: To borrow from a chapter heading in Cruelty and Silence, whither Iraq, both in the short and long term?

KM: To be honest, what I said in that chapter of the book still holds: It is up to us, Iraqis, to determine whether we fall into the abyss or pull back from it. In particular it is up to the politicians, and among them it is the Shiite politicians who shoulder the greatest responsibility of all. If the country plunges into civil war, history will determine that the responsibility for this was theirs in the first place.