The Assassins' Gate (11 page)

Makiya wasn't particularly interested in the opinions of most of the committee's other members; the word “inclusive” got on his nerves. As one of the State Department's American advisers on the project put it, in bland officialspeak, “Makiya did not pay heed to standard protocols for working in committee.” Instead, he and two close friends and colleagues—Rend Rahim, director of the Washington-based Iraq Foundation, and Salem Chalabi, a London lawyer and nephew of the Iraqi National Congress chairman—essentially left the others out and took over the writing of the report, all the while fending off pressure from the State Department to produce something politically neutral. The small group labored through the fall to draft a detailed blueprint for Iraq's transformation from totalitarianism to democracy. Makiya wasn't after the kind of document that could be produced by committee.

“It's the architect in me,” he said, nursing a cold over Japanese tea in Cambridge in early December. A decade earlier, Makiya had confessed, “Architects are such megalomaniacs.”

*   *   *

IT WAS ALSO THE EX-TROTSKYIST
in him. For somewhere in the cortex of Kanan Makiya—not deeply buried, either—was the name of Leon Trotsky, and alongside it the Trotskyist idea of an intellectual vanguard leading from the front, forcing history to move in the desired direction. Makiya left Baghdad in 1967 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the summer after his freshman year the most extreme faction of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, with an ideology that demanded the total dissolution of individual identity into the collective “Arabness” of the state, an ideology that the Baathists themselves described as a form of love, came to power in a coup—probably the least noticed and soonest forgotten of 1968's many utopian events. Public hangings of suspected Zionist spies soon followed before gigantic throngs in Baghdad's Liberation Square, and Iraq fell under the spell of fear that would continue for thirty-five years, during which Makiya never returned to his native country.

He joined left-wing exile politics at the most quixotic point along the spectrum—as a revolutionary socialist from the Middle East. The Six-Day War and the Palestinian cause galvanized him, as it did a whole generation of young Arabs, and for a time Makiya was a member of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But according to his and his comrades' Marxist analysis, the conflict was in essence a class struggle. Ultimately, the workers in Israeli factories and kibbutzim would join hands with the oppressed Arab masses to throw off the yokes of imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism. In Middle Eastern politics this was something of a minority view, and it meant that Makiya pursued a tributary separate from the great wave of Arab nationalism that surged in the 1960s. (As for political Islam, the wave that came next when the nationalist regimes showed themselves to be impotent and corrupt, it had no appeal whatsoever for the resolutely secular and atheist Makiya.) Nonetheless, he and his Iranian-born wife, Afsaneh, threw themselves into the intense world of exile politics, first in Cambridge, later in London, as militant critics of the Western powers, especially the United States.

They followed events in their home region from afar, through the 1970s and '80s: as the Palestinian liberation movement turned to terrorism, as Lebanon degenerated into a civil war in which all the factions resembled one another in their barbarism, as the revolution in Iran fell under the control of theocratic mullahs who imposed a reign of terror, as Iraq and Iran plunged into a seemingly endless war that consumed the lives of an entire generation in both countries. And at some point along the way, Makiya's thinking changed.

“I could no longer blame it on the United States,” he said. “This was probably the seismic shift in my consciousness. It wasn't the abstract abandonment of Marxism on the basis of some general principles. No. It was a felt experience—watching and seeing the Lebanese civil war, which had nothing to do with Marxist categories. Watching and seeing the Iranian revolution—again, Marxist categories were defeated. Watching and seeing the Iraq-Iran War. It wasn't the United States, it was Iraqis and Iranians who were bleeding themselves to death. The fact that there were people out there selling them guns was certainly deplorable, but I'm not going to turn my priorities upside down and refuse to see who's responsible. So it was this sense that the malaise was principally in my world, and not principally in the United States, that was the seismic shift in my politics.”

The shift would have large implications. If the malaise was principally in his part of the world, then all the isms of collective salvation—Marxism, nationalism, Baathism, Islamism—now looked like various roads to hell. The region had tried to leap from the Middle Ages right over the eighteenth century to modern, mostly imported dogmas, without enduring that profound rupture when legitimacy is separated from both might and faith, and the rights of the individual are enshrined as the basis of government. What the Middle East needed was an Enlightenment. In 1984, in a letter to a leftist friend, Makiya asked, “Could it be possible that a Marx today in a Middle Eastern political context is far less of a revolutionary than, say, a Voltaire?” Living a fairly marginal existence in New York and Cambridge, auditing classes at local universities, reading for the first time the works of Arendt, Hobbes, and Locke in libraries, and working hard on the manuscript of
Republic of Fear,
Makiya became a liberal.

As an Iraqi involved in politics, Makiya was something rare in the Arab world. There were plenty of liberation fighters; there were very few dissidents. The Arab sense of victimization at the hands of the imperialist and Zionist foreign enemy left little breathing room for an Egyptian Solzhenitsyn or a Syrian Havel to emerge (let alone survive). Without denying the justice of the Palestinian cause, Makiya began to feel that Arabs shouldn't regard it as the key to solving regional problems—Palestine no longer came first, either in time or in moral urgency. The crucial issue was no longer national liberation but democracy based on rights and, more profoundly, the value of life. Long after the end of colonialism, though, the stance of the democratic dissident—the critic of homegrown dictatorship—still looked in many Arab circles suspiciously like apostasy, especially when it was carried to its logical conclusion, as Makiya did at the end of the Gulf War, when he came forward and called on America to overthrow the tyrant in Baghdad.

By 1991, Makiya had come all the way around to the view that America's sins in the Middle East—and in his mind there were many—were sins of omission, not commission. Far from being an omnipotent puppet master, the United States was ineffectual in the region. The fall of the shah, the Iranian hostage crisis, the botched rescue attempt, the massive bombing at the marine base in Beirut followed by a hasty withdrawal from Lebanon, the kidnapping crisis, the silence that greeted Saddam's gassing of the Kurds: One display of American fecklessness after another prepared Saddam to believe that he could invade Kuwait with impunity. The United States was a force for ill in the region not because of what it was doing but what it was failing to do. Makiya had originally called on Arabs themselves to repel Saddam's aggression (the only other Arab willing to push this line, though for very different reasons, was a Saudi construction tycoon named Osama bin Laden), but the task was left to the armies of the Western powers. With the defeated Iraqi army in humiliating retreat back across the border along the “Highway of Death,” with Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite populations rising up to throw off Baathist rule, America was in a position to erase its shameful record in the region. But the Gulf War ended with a treaty that not only left Saddam where he was but allowed his helicopters to mow down thousands of Iraqis who'd had a glimpse of hope. For Makiya, there was no greater sin of omission.

After the war, he traveled through the Kurdish region of northern Iraq to hunt down official Baathist records of the Anfal, the genocide of the Kurds in the late 1980s, and to film a BBC documentary called
Saddam's Killing Fields.
In Kurdistan and later in London, Iraqis and Kuwaitis sought out Makiya to tell their stories of the genocide, the occupation, and the bloody repression of the uprisings. If he had simply collected them in his next book and called it
Cruelty,
he wouldn't have become a lightning rod of controversy. But his anger at the Arab intelligentsia's complacency in the face of Saddam's crimes was burning too high, and
Cruelty and Silence,
which came out in 1993, was not a cool meditation but a cri de coeur. Makiya sought to strip away the Arab world's apologetics and push the reader's face down into the stinking truth. Imagery of the foul smells produced by human cruelty pervades the testimony of witnesses. “There can be no more romance and no more false heroics in the Arab world,” Makiya wrote. “There is only the legacy of pain which must be grappled with by a new language and in a new style.”

Cruelty and Silence
was a provocation. One of the intellectuals arraigned by Makiya was Edward Said, the Palestinian-born professor of literature at Columbia University, author of the groundbreaking study
Orientalism,
which taught a whole generation of younger Arab intellectuals to see their world as the victim of age-old Western cultural imperialism. Said, who in his wearily elegant literary critic's prose had dismissed
Republic of Fear
as anti-Arab, who blamed the Gulf War on Western cultural imperialism, who (Makiya pointed out) had expressed doubt that Saddam's regime really gassed the Kurds. Said—the preeminent Arab intellectual in the West, a culture hero to Arabs and Western leftists alike—won no deference from the younger, little-known Iraqi. Makiya's own prose style, simple and intense, amounted to a rebuke: It said that Said's language and ideas were part of the moral wreckage of the region. This was more than an intergenerational quarrel between two Arab writers in exile. The larger contest was between two kinds of politics, two interpretations of the role of the intellectual and the source of Arab defeat.

Said's supporters in the academic world heaped abuse on
Cruelty and Silence.
Makiya, whose nature provided him with one skin too few, seemed to withdraw from the fray for the rest of the 1990s and devoted himself, in his book-filled Cambridge flat, to his historical novel. The name of Edward Said grew ever more illustrious, while Kanan Makiya slipped back into obscurity. But a decade after the Gulf War, when Makiya suddenly emerged as a highly visible supporter of a new Iraq war, one that would finish what the first had left undone, Said turned on him with fury, as if the argument had never stopped churning beneath the surface.

Writing in the Cairo weekly
al-Ahram,
Said swept aside Makiya's views about the democratic and federal shape of a future Iraq. Instead, he wanted to know “who he is and from what background he emerges.” Said answered his own question: Makiya was a vain, posturing, compassionless man, living “between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except his own upwardly mobile career),” eager to serve his masters in the U.S. government (where Said imagined Makiya occupying a desk at the State Department) just as Makiya's father, the architect Mohamed Makiya, had once worked for Saddam. (This was true, for a period in the early 1980s, and it had caused a breach between Kanan and his father that took years to heal. That Makiya had indirectly benefited through his share of his father's firm's profits was also true; Makiya had used those profits to write
Republic of Fear.
That Makiya himself had worked for Saddam, as Said charged more than once, was false.) Said once wrote approvingly of the Arab tendency to ask of any speaker,
“Min warrah?”
—Who's behind him? Look behind Kanan Makiya and you found Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld. That was enough for Said.

So there was a quality of conspiratorial thinking in Said's attack, as well as a remarkable stream of ad hominem invective. But the donnish superiority that was Said's habitual tone kept cracking as if under pressure. The possibility that none other than Kanan Makiya might be “the voice and the example of the future of Iraq,” while history bypassed Edward Said, and his own cause, the Palestinian cause, turned to rubble, was so ludicrous that it seemed to induce a kind of panic.

The essay sent the world of Arab exile politics into an uproar. I spoke with Makiya shortly after it came out. He was trying for intellectual detachment. “Said is expressing an ideology that was dominant in Arab political culture, that I was a part of in the post-'67 period, the view that the Palestinian question came first,” Makiya said. “But you look at it from an Iraqi point of view, he'll tell you: ‘Have you got a million dead? How many people died in your second intifada? One thousand five hundred?'” He returned to Said. “I think he's cut a tragic figure, really. His politics is in a deep sense—and this is probably what he's deep-down angry at—it's what we called in Arab politics, in common parlance, rejectionist politics. You reject, you reject, you reject. You don't ever work to make it better.” Still, I could tell that Makiya was hurt and a little stunned by the nastiness of Said's attack. His own polemical style was sharp but clean, aimed at the idea rather than the man. He tended to take people at face value, not to look for hidden agendas or irrational motives. He expected to be approached in the same way, and because his feelings were too sensitive for his own good, the tumultuous history into which he now threw himself made him vulnerable. There was more than a little naïveté in Makiya—a worrying trait, given the project he was about to sign on for.

*   *   *

FOR, AFTER ALL
, who
was
behind him?

The arc of history had taken Makiya from radical leftist politics to liberalism, to a belief that human rights, not nationalism or socialism, was the supreme cause and, in his home region, the truly revolutionary one. By political affiliation, he identified with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But as an Iraqi living at the start of the twenty-first century, his cause made him the ally of American neoconservatives. A few of them had the name of Leon Trotsky somewhere in their cortex, but most were likelier to cite Ronald Reagan as their inspiration. The fit was imperfect. The neoconservatives saw American power in almost messianic terms—they were nationalists—while Makiya was interested only in what American power could achieve in Iraq on behalf of liberal ideals.