We failed, says pro-war Iraqi

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile under Saddam and a key intellectual inspiration for the US policy of 'regime change' in Iraq, has admitted he failed to foresee the consequences for his country of the invasion four years ago.

In an interview in yesterday's New York Times, Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, the book that brought the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime to international attention, concedes he allowed his own 'activism' to sway his judgment and launched a scathing denunciation of US policy after the fall of Baghdad, and of Iraq's new leadership. In the week of the invasion's fourth anniversary, the voice that cried loudest for the toppling of Saddam described the day of Saddam's execution 'as one of the worst' of his life.

'It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster,' Makiya said. 'I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears. It was the antithesis of everything I had been working for. Just like everything about the war, it was an opportunity wasted.' He catalogued the errors - including his own - that led to the present bloodbath. It is all a remarkable change of tone for the man who was once a friend of Ahmed Chalabi, has been praised in public by Vice President Dick Cheney and is highly regarded by anti-Saddam Iraqi democrats.

Makiya, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says his disaffection with the 'Iraq project' has been growing for some time. 'Now it seems necessary to reflect on the society that has gotten itself into this mess. A question that looms more and more for me is: just what did 30 years of dictatorship do to 25 million people?'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2042195,00.html

NYT: Critic of Hussein Grapples With Horrors of Post-Invasion Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/world/middleeast/24makiya.html

How sad.

Makiya wouldn't know because he never lived in Iraq under Saddam. He was featured prominently in George Packer's book, The Assassins' Gate, which begins with a number of reminiscenses of late night talks about the splendor of a liberated Iraq at Makiya's study in Cambridge., Mass. these soon ran up against the unpleasant reality of the new world we had created:

<Much of the pathos of "The Assassins' Gate" derives from Packer's increasing realization that Makiya's beautiful vision bore no connection to reality. Over the course of his reporting from Iraq, Packer realized just how disconnected from Iraq Makiya was. As the situation in Iraq deteriorated in the summer after the invasion, Packer ran into his mentor in Baghdad. Makiya was working on a project called the Memory Foundation, a memorial to the dreadful decades of Saddam's rule which he hoped would " Iraqis' perceptions of themselves in such a way as to create the basis for a tolerant civil society that is capable of adjusting to liberal democratic culture."

<By now, Packer has little patience for such projects, however well-meaning. "Makiya was consumed with thoughts about the past and the future; I wanted him to acknowledge that the present was a disaster. Phrases like 'tolerant civil society' and 'liberal democratic culture' did not inspire me in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. They sounded abstract and glib amid the daily grinding chaos of the city, and they made me angry at him and myself -- for I had had my own illusions.">

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/10/07/packer/index.html?pn=1

But that's what you had in this country prior to the invasion: tons of people who didn't know the first thing about the realities on the ground in Iraq, led by exiles like Makiya, and their fellow idealistic travelers like Packer (who supported the invasion) deciding that all of this would be a good idea...Madness.