Talk:Kanan Makiya

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• Iraqis have not had a permanent constitution since 1958. This process of engaging society as a whole in its own future, engaging it once again in the idea of a permanent constitution, is a beginning, it seems to me, of creating the kind of civil society that we hope to see flourish in Iraq once again.
  • "This way to the promised land", Globe and Mail (10 April 2003)

• The Arab world has seen elections before. However, virtually all of them were artificial affairs, their outcomes never in doubt. They were in the end celebrations of one version or another of autocracy, never a repudiation of them. That kind of state-management is not what has just taken place in Iraq. Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one's own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out. No wonder the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world are so worried, and no wonder they were so hostile to everything that happened in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. They had longed for failure. They trotted out the tired old formulas of anti-Americanism to impart legitimacy to the so-called Iraqi "resistance to American occupation." But the people of Iraq have put an end to all that. En masse, ordinary people took to the streets in the second great Iraqi revolt against the politics of barbarism exemplified by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's immortal words: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."
  • "The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (7 February 2005)

• The terrible lesson of Palestinian politics is that a leadership that elevates victimhood into the be-all and end-all of politics brings untold suffering and misery upon its own people. Given political power, this kind of a leadership will in turn victimize. This is an iron law of social and political psychology confirmed by any number of recent historical experiences. The insurgents in Iraq fully understand this dynamic; in fact they are counting on it. That is why their goal is not to win over Iraqi hearts and minds; it is rather to inculcate a state of pervasive physical insecurity, conducive to the eruption of the most irrational forms of behavior. Theirs is a politics of fear and intimidation borrowed from that of the former regime which produced them, and it is a politics designed to create a backlash among those very Iraqis who so rightfully today wear the blue-black stain on their right index finger as a badge of honor.
  • "The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (7 February 2005)

• Since 1968, the Baath have been trashing the only idea that can hold the great social diversity of Iraq together: the idea of Iraq. Their answer to the question "Who am I?" was: You are either one of us, or you are dead. True to their word, they killed anyone who dared to say he was a Kurd or a Shiite or a leftist, or a democrat and a liberal. Contrary to what many Iraqi Shiites tend to think nowadays, the Baath never wanted to build a Sunni confessional state in Iraq. Anti-Shiite sectarianism was introduced on a large scale after the uprising of 1991. The state that the Baath built in Iraq up until the 1991 Gulf War was worse than sectarian. It thrived on the distrust, suspicion and fear that it went about inculcating in everyone. In this sense it was consistently egalitarian. Atomizing society by breeding hate and a thirst for revenge was the regime's highest ambition and principal tool of social control. Every Iraqi -- Kurd or Arab, Muslim or Christian, Shiite or Sunni -- became both complicit in the Baathist enterprise and its victim at the same time.
  • "The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (7 February 2005)

• The failure to control Iraq's borders on day one after regime change was a strategic blunder of incalculable consequences. It all goes back to inadequate troop levels not to knock Saddam out, but to maintain the peace after his overthrow. The problem of the borders incidentally pertains not only to Qaeda but to Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard member for whom access into Iraq is until today a very easy thing.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• I am not sure I would hold the media responsible for telling lies about Iraq. Perhaps uch earlier, before August 1990, it should have done more to inform Americans on the atrocities being perpetrated in Iraq.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• The US has not committed atrocities in Iraq that are even remotely comparable to what Saddam did.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• I think of Iraq as a kind of Pandora's box, the lid of which the US knocked open. The hope was that politicians could artfully manage the furies that were bound to emerge. That proved unfounded. The furies are now out there doing their terrible work. Eventually they will be tamed. The whole of history is evidence of that. But how long is "eventually"?
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• The US did think of replacing Saddam with some army officers. At the time (2002-03) I bristled with anger at the idea. I still would not accept it. And yet I cannot deny that it just might have led to a situation that was better than the one we face at the present.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• The US lost control of security on day one, with the outbreak of looting. Iraqis are a people that had known nothing but a surplus of security. To suddenly take all that away and say, in effect, you are on your own, was unforgivable. They felt that no one was in control. And when your whole world is being turned upside down, the feeling that no one is in control is terrifying, and consequently it is conducive of the most irrational forms of behavior.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• You--i.e. the US--didn't wreck Iraq a fraction as much as we--i.e. Iraqis--did. The looting for instance destroyed orders of magnitude more infrastructure than the war ever did.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

• Iraq was far more dangerous to the region--the Middle east--than the reprehensible Saudi regime is or ever will become. It had after all launched two deeply destructive wars, and was intent on becoming hegemonic in the region.
  • "Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)