Amigo, There's current news that Halliburton is going to lose many contracts with the US army.
I missed some meaty stuff from Buchanan's op-ed piece:
"As one reviews the ledgers of his foreign policy, Bush seems to have alienated or antagonized just about everyone on Earth, with precious little to compensate us for our war losses. And if we are about to jettison his cowboy diplomacy, perhaps it is time to look again at the successful policies Bush and the neocons dismissed and deplore. For, unlike theirs, these policies never failed America.
What are they? The anti-interventionism of the Founding Fathers from Washington to Wilson, and the conservative policy of containment and deterrence pursued by Eisenhower and Reagan."
Now, there's a brilliant idea: Real Republicanism.
Baghdad Burning
... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Atrocities...
It promises to be a long summer. We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.
The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.
The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.
At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.
He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.
People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum Akhir il ahzan " or "May this be the last of your sorrows." Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.
There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven't heard what the casualties are. People are saying it's Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress.
It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war death killing bombing rape "
Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?
In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.
It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?
Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.
Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.
It's difficult to believe T. is really gone I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents
- posted by river @ 11:43 PM
I missed some meaty stuff from Buchanan's op-ed piece:
"As one reviews the ledgers of his foreign policy, Bush seems to have alienated or antagonized just about everyone on Earth, with precious little to compensate us for our war losses. And if we are about to jettison his cowboy diplomacy, perhaps it is time to look again at the successful policies Bush and the neocons dismissed and deplore. For, unlike theirs, these policies never failed America.
What are they? The anti-interventionism of the Founding Fathers from Washington to Wilson, and the conservative policy of containment and deterrence pursued by Eisenhower and Reagan."
TO: ACFR Committee Members and Friends
FROM: Ken Jensen
NOTE: Thanks to Harold Rhode for providing the following long interview with Kanan Makiya. Makiya is perhaps Iraq's leading intellectual, a longstanding oppositionist and human rights advocate, and thoughtful chronicler of Iraq's contemporary history. Any number of pieces by him have appeared in the NewsGroup over the years, but this one is assuredly special.
DEMOCRATIYA [www.democratiya.com KMJ]
Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya
Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, and the President of The Iraq Memory Foundation. His books, The Republic of Fear: Inside Saddam's Iraq (1989, written as Samir al-Khalil] and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) are classic texts on the nature of totalitarianism. Makiya has also collaborated on films for television. The award-winning film, Saddam's Killing Fields, exposed the Anfal, the 1988 campaign of mass murder conducted by the Ba'ath regime in northern Iraq. In October 1992, he acted as the convenor of the Human Rights Committee of the Iraqi National Congress. He was closely involved in the Iraqi Opposition in the run-up to the Iraq War, which he supported as a war of liberation. The interview took place on December 16 2005.
Alan Johnson: Can you tell me about your family background in Iraq?
Kanan Makiya: I was born and brought up in a middle upper class family in Baghdad. I recall a very liberal outlook at home. My mother is of English origin but she cut all her ties with England when her family refused to acknowledge her marriage to my father. I've never known anybody from the English side of my family, the rejection was so great. My father's mother accepted my mother and she integrated in Iraq. So I grew up as an insider with an outsider's perspective, reading English from a very early age, especially fiction that others of my generation might not have read.
Alan Johnson: Such as?
Kanan Makiya: One of the most important books I read when I was 17 or 18, just on the edge of becoming political, was Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I also read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. And Thomas Hardy, a writer I admired very greatly, and who was not available in Arabic. I also read Arabic fiction, of course.
My father was Head of the Department of Architecture at Baghdad University, so we had circles of architects and artists in and out of the house all the time. I sort of grew up with them. I drew on that background when I wrote The Monument (1991).
The first political event of my life was the 1967 Arab/Israeli war. Although I had no political background, I started to listen to the BBC during the war. In Baghdad we were getting triumphalist speeches from the Arab Nationalist Regime (that preceded the Ba'athist takeover in '68) telling us the Arabs were winning, and that the Israelis were on the run. All lies and bullshit. And I remember knowing that it was bullshit at the time. I had my first political discussion with young men and women of my age in Baghdad, at a public swimming pool where we gathered. I said, 'it's lies, it's lies, it's not true'. The Arab world was losing the war, superfast, but there was this denial. And ordinary people only had what the regular news was saying. I remember being infuriated by that obvious lie.
Radical Politics
In the summer of 1967 Iraq cut all its relations with the United States and Britain. But I won an acceptance to study architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The great old Iraqi 'wasta' came into play, the practice of turning to people of influence to go around bureaucratic procedure. My father called in favours. 'My son just got his acceptance...', and so on. Finally he managed to swing it. People say I must have been the only one who left the summer of '67 to go and study in the United States.
At first, I pushed politics away and threw myself into a whole new world. I had never been in the United States before, and I was alone. The next formative event was Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. Everyone dropped everything. Students started making an exhibition. I did not know much about him, but I remember throwing myself into it heart and soul. That was really the beginning.
Soon I had these two lives. I became very active in the anti-war movement, which was burgeoning in the United States. And I was very active in supporting the emerging Palestinian Resistance Movement. I passed through the Nationalist Palestinian groups and I ended up in the Marxist one. All of this happened very rapidly. Within a span of a year I became a Marxist and was attracted to Trotskyist politics. The great influence on me was Emmanuel Farjoun, a member of the Israeli Socialist Organisation, Matzpen. He was also a student at MIT, much older than I. He had enjoyed a socialist training from day dot having grown up in a left socialist kibbutz. It was a revelation for me to meet an Israeli who was critical of his own society. He explained a) basic socialist principles which, of course, were completely new to me, and b) the nature of Israeli society, which was also a revelation for me. We became very, very close friends, almost brothers, for the next twenty-five years. (We fell out over the Iraq war but that's another story. That's sad, very sad.)
I started to soak up books and I became active in the Socialist Workers' Party, the American section of the (Trotskyist) 4th International. I moved to Britain in 1974 and I became active in the International Marxist Group (IMG). I recall there was a Lebanese Trotskyist organisation, remnants of an Iraqi Trotskyist organisation, and some Egyptian and Tunisian Trotskyists. I spent a lot of time in those countries meeting those people, going backwards and forwards to Lebanon. I was a full time political activist.
Lebanese Civil War
The Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975 between the so-called 'progressive' and 'reactionary' forces. That's how we tended to view it. There were those who were on the side of the class struggle and those who were against. But that form of classification was really at odds with the way the war was unfolding. Sectarian and communitarian tensions were at work in the so-called 'left' front of forces, which was really nationalist and radical-nationalist and sometimes capable of the same sorts of atrocities as the Christian forces, or 'reactionary' forces as we insisted on calling them.
The left insisted it was not a sectarian war. That was troubling to me but I had no other set of categories. In fact, the Palestinians were now behaving very badly, like little Mafia's inside Lebanon. I used to write in the journal called Khamsin, which was a journal of Middle Eastern socialist revolutionaries, edited by Moshe Machover in those days. And there were Arabs involved, like the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al-Azm, and others. I used to write articles critical of the Palestinians, even though I was basically working with them. I wrote under a pseudonym, Muhammad Ja'far, in those days. A tension was building up between the way the Middle Eastern world was, to my eyes, and the way our categories described it. The two didn't match.
The Iranian Revolution
I stayed in this contradictory position for three or four years, until the Iranian revolution. My wife was an Iranian and a student at Harvard. She had quit and joined revolutionary politics. The line of the 4th International was that the Iranian revolution was a progressive thing. We were all supposed to think that. Everyone was working against the Shah and his secret police. But, as the clerics became stronger and stronger, even before the revolution itself, I started to become deeply critical. My wife had returned to Iran and was fighting the good fight from inside Iran. So, was my criticism based on personal impulses? Maybe I thought I had lost this person that I loved. Maybe that was driving me. Or maybe it was just a political assessment of the situation. Probably the biggest lesson you can learn in politics is that you can never completely separate these two things. It's better to be frank and recognise this. Anyway, I launched a big criticism of the Iranian revolution at a time when the left was celebrating it as one in a long line of great historic revolutions.
My wife returned broken. The left had been smashed. The Iran-Iraq war broke out. Our former comrades were being imprisoned or killed in Iran. We both left organised Trotskyist politics around that time on the issue of the Iraq-Iran war. The left was saying it was a war with a good side and a bad side. We were saying a plague on both your houses because this is an ugly, nasty war that is not going to lead to progress for anyone, so victory for either side would be a step backward.
Alan Johnson: Did you find any support for that view among your comrades?
Kanan Makiya: There were individuals. Bob Langston, I remember, from the Socialist Workers' Party. Jon Rothschild and others were very sympathetic. But their sympathy was not shared by the leadership. Afsaneh and I resigned over it. We wrote a huge document that explained the whole thing, in the usual fashion.
I was now totally alienated from my previous world view. I thought it didn't describe the world I was now in. These had been seminal events: the Lebanese civil war, and the behaviour of the Palestinians, when they lost their halo entirely from my point of view, the Iranian revolution and the Iraq-Iran war.
Writing The Republic of Fear
Alan Johnson: To me, the greatness of your first book, The Republic of Fear, is three-fold: your description of totalitarian violence and the unveiling of its true role in Saddam's Iraq; your tracing of the genealogy of that totalitarianism across the generations, and its seepage into intellectual, political and military milieus; and the suggestiveness - prescience, maybe - about the legacy of that appalling political and intellectual culture at a psychic as well as institutional level, a legacy that weighs down on the effort to build a new Iraq today. Can you tell me how you came to write Republic of Fear?
Kanan Makiya: Stories were coming out of Iraq from family and friends of the horrific things that were going on. I had blocked Iraq out of my mind. A whole generation of Arabs of my age threw themselves into supporting the Palestinians post-1967 at the expense of facing the degradation of politics going on in their own countries. But as these stories started to filter out I had the idea of writing a book about Iraq. I threw myself into it and that was the turning point.
The writing of what became The Republic of Fear took six years. I had returned to England. It was probably the 6 most wonderful years of my life, in some senses. Nobody knew I was writing this book, except 4 or 5 friends. My parents didn't know until they discovered by accident, but that's a long story. I discovered writers I'd never read before, above all Hannah Arendt. Also Isaiah Berlin, John Stuart Mill, Hobbes: very basic texts that I'd never read. I had spent weeks and months studying Capital and Theories of Surplus Value but I had never read John Stuart Mill! This was the lopsided education that we all had. These basic texts I discovered, as I was writing Republic of Fear, became very important to me. They changed my whole way of thinking about politics, though they didn't change certain underlying values. I discovered liberal politics. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, in particular, gave me a model of how to understand, for instance, the Ba'ath front organisations. She analyses the nature of those front organisations, how they work, how power was exercised through them. She had studied how networks of informers functioned in society and how states operate through networks of informers to exercise power. I understood power and political authority in a wholly new way through Arendt.
I now understood far better the independence of the political from the economic and the social, which, of course, I had previously refused to accept. My first outlines of Republic of Fear always involved a kind of genuflection to the economic level. The first chapter would be on the economy and the forces of production. The second chapter would be social classes and only then would follow the politics. Now what I really wanted to write about were the horrific stories about how the secret police was behaving. I wanted to write about the experiences reflected in those stories - of the different kinds and levels of violence, of people informing on one another, of a break up and an atomisation of Iraqi society that had nothing to do with how the forces of production were going. But, for some time, I couldn't let go of those categories. So the very first outlines always had those perfunctory things. But, as I worked and worked on the book, and as it went through many transformations in the six years it took to write, those chapters [on the productive forces, etc] would go down in the outline, while the things I wanted to write about-violence, cruelty, the politics of fear, intimidation etc-came up, Finally I realised, 'My God, I don't want to write about this. It's interesting but it's not what is driving this book.' So I dropped them altogether. I remember that was my big sin when the book went to Verso Books to be published.
Alan Johnson: Verso turned it down?
Kanan Makiya: Yes, Verso turned it down for that very reason. So I went hunting for a publisher. This was 1986. I had over 70 rejections before anybody would take up the book. But I was 'on a roll' as they say. I had been buoyed up by that feeling that I was changing and doing something new, and perhaps important. I started writing another book even before the first one found a publisher!
I was circulating a manuscript under a pseudonym and nobody knew who I was. My first wife, Afsaneh Najmabadi, who is now an academic in the States at Harvard, vouched that I existed! In the end the California University Press came to the rescue when they took on The Republic of Fear and the book was finally published in 1989. I will never forget the courage of the editor at the University of California Press, Lyne Withey, who took the book on. She never saw me, she never met me, she never talked to me. University of California Press had never published an anonymous book before, let alone a book written under a pseudonym. It took great courage, and a special decision at the level of the board of directors of the press.
Alan Johnson: What do you remember of the reception of the book?
Kanan Makiya: Until Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait only Iraqi exiles were interested in the book. It sold 300 or 400 copies at most. It was about to die a death as many books do. But when Saddam Hussein entered Kuwait it started selling in great numbers and overnight I found myself in a whole new world. I finally went public about my identity in March 1991, at a public event at the Centre for Middle East Studies at Harvard University, with other Iraqi oppositionists. Bahr al-Uloom, who was a cleric, Hoshyar Zebari, who is Iraq's Foreign Minister today, Ahmed Chalabi, and myself, had been invited by Roy Mottahedeh, the Director of the Center.
1991: Towards Cruelty and Silence
The talk I gave at that meeting was expanded into an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books. I argued that the war should be finished by going all the way to Baghdad. That was a very controversial position.
Alan Johnson: Did a storm break at that point?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. The previous good wishes that had been passed in my direction from the left ended. I was viewed as a complete traitor. I was called a 'quisling'. But my position [that the uprisings should be supported and Saddam should be deposed] was a logical continuation of the changes that had taken place in my thinking during the course of the writing of The Republic of Fear. The be-all-and-end-all of politics was removing this dictatorship in Iraq. Abstract considerations-such as the categories 'imperialism' and 'Zionism'-became totally secondary in importance to the removal of dictatorship. I had written in The Republic of Fear that the legitimation of this dictatorship had taken place on the grounds of Zionism and the threat the Zionists represented to the Arab world. In throwing away that rhetoric and the whole political language associated with Arab Nationalist politics it was the internationalist spirit-present in my early formation in the Trotskyist movement-that was very much present. The fact was that I had seen anti-Zionist activists from inside Israel meant that Israel, did not exist, in my mind, as the font of all evil. I discarded all that baggage. I have a sort of single minded and obsessive track of mind and I just went straight for what was crucial and what was essential: getting rid of this evil dictatorship. Everything else was subordinate.
The Arab left had essentially become a moribund force. It was locked into old categories. All through the 1980s it could go nowhere. There was nothing new coming out of the political culture. We were locked in the dynamic and the language of the Lebanese civil war. Issues of human rights, of building civil society, of dictatorship, of our own responsibility for our own ills, were all constantly being subordinated by the old language of anti-Zionism and anti-Imperialism. I had come along with Republic of Fear and said the most important thing is what we have done to ourselves. I was bending the stick, as we say. Many Arabs, and people on the left who identify as 'pro-Arab', objected. Why? Well, the moment one passes from analysis and description to political action a boundary is crossed.
Writing Cruelty and Silence
Alan Johnson: In the preface to Republic of Fear you noted 'the terrible silence of the intelligentsia'. You asked 'Where are the Arab Vaclav Havel's and Christa Wolf's who will call Saddam to account?' In your next book Cruelty and Silence (1993) you exposed, indicted and explained this silence of the intellectuals. Faced with the cruelty of the Iraqi regime towards its people, parts of the Arab intelligentsia, and the western, often 'left', intelligentsia, had offered up a catalogue of evasions: silence, exculpation, complicity, rationalisation, subject changing, denial, avoidance. How did you come to write Cruelty and Silence?
Kanan Makiya: It was born in the tumultuous last moments of the 1991 Gulf war and was filled with the anger and energy of somebody caught up in that moment. It was a cry for elevating cruelty, violence, and abuse over any other consideration.
The first Gulf war had suddenly opened up this enormous reservoir of Iraqis who wanted to tell their horrific stories of the Anfal, of being in prison, of being crushed during the uprising, and of daily life under Saddam's regime. The people's testimonies were the driving force of Cruelty and Silence.
The book is divided into two parts, cruelty and silence. Part one gives a platform to the words of victims. It's almost two thirds of the length of the book. I spent days taping interviews with these individuals. Each individual victim stood for a lot of others with similar experiences. I wove a larger story around these individuals. Around Khalid, the Kuwaiti, I wove the story of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Abu Hayder, the Shiite officer who accompanied Majid al-Khoei when he went to beg for help from the American forces, symbolised the uprising that followed the first Gulf War. The story of Umar, the Sunni Arab, stood for all the people who had gone into Ba'athist prisons for no reason at all. (In his case somebody told a joke in a party. He entered hell and came out again to tell the tale.) The story of the Kurds was told through two other individuals, Mustafa and a young boy called Taimour.
In the second part of the book, called Silence, I pit the words of Arab and western intellectuals of my generation, many of the left, against all these Iraqi words about violence and cruelty. The point was that between the two sets of words there was a chasm. The intellectuals offered rhetoric about 'nationalism', 'Imperialism', 'the Crusades', and so on. The focus of the book was about the rhetoric that the war had generated and the chasm between that rhetoric and the reality. Between these two realities - the words of the intellectuals and the words of the victims - was a yawning gap.
Putting Cruelty First
The cry of the book was for 'putting cruelty first', as I put it. I took this phrase from a person who had begun to influence me greatly. Judith Shklar's Ordinary Vices (Belknap Press, 1985) is a wonderful book. It contains an essay that is almost my Bible. It's called Putting Cruelty First. Cruelty and Silence was not a very complicated book at all. It was about the importance of putting cruelty first.
Alan Johnson: Cruelty and Silence was met on parts of the left with a quite extraordinary hostility. Edward Said wrote, 'Most of what Makiya wrote in the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists'. Unwittingly, by invoking the reaction of the West as the prism through which to read and judge the book, and by his use of this figure of 'the West' as a means to exculpate the Arab intellectual, he kind of proved your case.
Kanan Makiya: In writing that book, I was naïve. I had thought that I would simulate a debate in the circles I had come from. There was no debate or dialogue. I thought that the weight of the words of the victims would make the case. All you had to do was read the first half of the book. As it turned out, most of these intellectuals only read the second part of the book and the references to themselves. I was naming names, you see. I couldn't just write general abstractions. I was pitting words against words. Two sets of words had to clash with one another. So I named names. That upset people no end, and there was a huge backlash. The book was blasted by the very people I thought I was opening a dialogue with. I realise now how naive that whole approach was.
Alan Johnson: And there was character assassination. You were personally attacked.
Kanan Makiya: Oh, it was the beginning of a terrible period. After that book came out in 1993 I was actually depressed for a couple of years. I couldn't write anything. But this hostile reaction was not an Iraqi reaction. I was buoyed up by that fact. A chasm had opened up between the way Iraqis viewed politics and the way the rest of the Arab world, and the left, did. Among the latter there were only individuals-I have in mind people like Fran Hazleton, Peter Sluglett, David Hirst, and, of course, the CARDRI people (The Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq)-who really faced the nature of this regime.
Alan Johnson: Peter Sluglett is reviewing the reprint of Hanna Batatu's monumental book on Iraqi politics and society in Democractiya 4. The excellent Saqi Books have republished it.
Kanan Makiya: Oh good! Peter's wonderful.
