Except for rascals like Christopher Hitchens, most of the pro-war “left”
has reversed itself (George Packer, Johann Hari)–without of course
abrogating the right of the US to act as world’s cop when the cause is
supposedly just (Afghanistan, Darfur, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, etc.) There is
also a group that still supports the invasion but keeps a low profile.
You will not find them on talk show circuits repeating George W. Bush’s
talking points slathered over with references to Camus, Orwell and
Koestler. Mostly they have retreated from the public scene and shake
their heads at the catastrophe that resulted from “poor planning” and
other blunders.
The New York Times Magazine gave a platform to one of them last Sunday:
Iraqi intellectual and former Trotskyist Kanan Makiya, who is the author
of a number of books with scholarly pretensions that provided fuel for
the invasion in 2002 and 2003. In one of Judith Miller’s pro-war
propaganda pieces written on January 12, 2003, she described Makiya’s
touching faith in George Bush’s promises:
None of the Iraqi participants were willing to discuss precisely
what Mr. Bush said. But Kanan Makiya, a professor at Brandeis University
and a leading Iraqi intellectual, said he was “deeply reassured” by what
he called “the president’s intense commitment to a genuinely democratic
post-Saddam Iraq” and by Mr. Bush’s determination to press forward not
only with “removing Saddam from office, but reconstructing Iraq after a
military conflict.”
“Mr. Bush was clearly aware that Iraq was not Afghanistan, and that
it has the human and financial resources needed to support democracy,”
Mr. Makiya said.
Miller lost her job but Makiya’s career–at least in the US–did not
suffer any consequences for such boneheaded statements. He is a
professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. My
advice to people trying to decide where to send their children to
college is to take this place off their list.
Not only has Makiya’s political fortunes taken a turn for the worse, so
has his health:
Makiya’s life is no longer what it was. In 2003, on returning to
Iraq, he reunited with his sweetheart from high-school days, married and
took her back to Cambridge. He also found out he has chronic lymphocytic
leukemia, the same disease that killed Edward Said, the Palestinian-born
Columbia University professor and Makiya’s intellectual nemesis.
While it would be impossible to prove this, one wonders if living in
such a heavily polluted environment such as Iraq might have led to Mr.
Makiya’s cancer. In Houston, Texas, there are 56 percent more incidents
of childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia for families living in close
proximity to the petroleum refineries. Since George W. Bush and his
cronies are responsible for the woeful state of both Texas and Iraq
today, there is some irony in Makiya being so afflicted.
Said never rested a moment in the final years of his life when he was
battling leukemia. He did everything in his power to expose the lies
that people like Makiya were churning out to the Bush White House. In a
article that appeared in the November 28, 2002 Al-Ahram titled
“Misinformation about Iraq“, Said directed his fire against Makiya:
The most complete version of his plans for Iraq after an American
invasion that derive from his current employment as a resident employee
of the US Department of State, appears in the November 2002 issue of
Prospect, a good liberal British monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya
begins his “proposal” by enumerating the extraordinary assumptions
behind his arguments, two of which almost by definition are
unimaginable. The first is that “the unseating” of Saddam should not
occur after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on Mars to
imagine that, in the event of a war, a massive bombing attack would not
occur even though every single plan circulated for regime change in Iraq
has stated explicitly that Iraq would be bombed mercilessly. The second
assumption is equally imaginative, since Makiya seems to believe against
all evidence that the US is committed to democracy and nation-building
in Iraq. Why he thinks that Iraq is like Germany and Japan after World
War II (both of which were rebuilt because of the Cold War) is beyond
me; besides, he doesn’t once mention the fact that the US is determined
to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country’s oil reserves and
because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So, he starts out by making
preposterous assumptions that simply fly in the face of all the evidence.
The New York Times Magazine article was written by Dexter Filkins who
might be described as Judith Miller lite. Along with the equally
detestable Michael R. Gordon, they have been writing article after
article trying to prove that Iran is behind all the troubles in Iraq.
Filkins also served as a conduit for Pentagon propaganda blaming al
Qaeda for the troubles in Iraq. Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post
reported that the military had made a “selective leak” about al-Qaeda
leader Zarqawi to Dexter Filkins. The article, making much of a letter
supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq,
ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004. In other words, just the
kind of reporter to rely on for an accounting of Makiya’s sins.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/kanan-makiya/
