Iraq - Regrets Only? NY Times

Regrets Only
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: October 7, 2007 - NY Times

Dokan, Iraq They were well into their dinner when the talk turned to the most troubling question of all. The guests, brought here to discuss plans for the American University of Iraq, had been passing around platters of shabbout, an oily and bony fish, in the dining room of a villa owned by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, when the question came up. The six Iraqis and one Lebanese-American had gathered in this lakeside guesthouse in the mountains of Kurdistan, far from the furies of Baghdad and Basra. No one had actually posed the question; it crept up on its own. Among Iraqi exiles, particularly those who had been instrumental in persuading the Americans to invade, it was still something of a taboo.

“Leave Saddam in power?” asked Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, holding court in the middle.
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The conversation drifted along on a cloud of agreement until Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, leaned forward to pose a question.
“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.
There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.

“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”

Someone said something about a study.

“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07MAKIYA-t.html?th&emc=th

"You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong."

No Makiya, what was morally wrong was aligning yourself with those who have an ulterior and greedy motive for illegally invading a country. What was morally wrong was shoving your naive views (greeted with sweets and flowers) down the throats of an ignorant public. What was morally wrong was asking other people to kill and lay down their own lives (while you stay safely at home) for your romantic, fantasy dreams. Realists were not morally wrong, you were!