Kanan Makiya, Brandeis Professor and Misguided War Hawk

Tomorrow, a critical column that I wrote about Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis Professor of Middle Eastern Studies (my major) and an Iraqi exile who helped with U.S. invasion of Iraq will appear in The Justice, the campus newspaper for which I am a columnist. The published version tomorrow will be a lot shorter for space concerns, but I'll post the original version here. I think all Americans have a responsibility to condemn those that took an active role in helping the U.S. war effort wherever they are. For example, when war participants like Kanan Makiya speak in your area, be sure to be there to make them feel uncomfortable in one way or another. People who helped a war that has killed over 100,000 people deserve as much.

Anyways, here it is....

The Misadventure of a Brandeis Professor

By Joe Farbeann

Speaking before an audience at Schwartz Auditorium on Tuesday, March 1, Brandeis Professor Kanan Makiya focused on his project with the Iraq Memory Foundation to document human rights abuses under Iraq’s Ba’athist regime. What Makiya did not talk about was his role in helping to plan and promote the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq that has resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths and has left in Iraq in chaos and under a brutal occupation. In his efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, Makiya participated in the Pentagon’s campaign of distortions and was a close ally of convicted criminal and suspected Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi. Makiya’s actions in support of the Iraq war were improper, and his failure to own up to his mistakes may undermine his current efforts to record the abuses of Iraq’s past.

While on leave from Brandeis, Makiya’s has worked to obtain documents and oral histories that demonstrate the brutality of the Ba’athists. This can be seen as a culmination of his life’s work as an Iraqi dissident, which began with his publishing of Republic of Fear in 1989 under a pseudonym. As he said in his lecture at Brandeis, his courageous work has focused on understanding the “frailty of human beings” in the context of Ba’athist cruelty. Makiya envisioned an Iraqi state that would respect both human and minority rights, and when the Bush administration began to push for war with Iraq, Makiya saw it as his chance to help create the Iraq he idealized and began to eagerly assist the war effort. While Makiya had the best intentions, the others involved in the planning and selling of the war seemed to have more sinister motives.

Instead of being a major player in the effort to create a humane, democratic Iraq, Makiya allowed himself to be used by a disgusting array of oil men, war profiteers, and corrupt self-aggrandizing exiles. After meeting with war planners, Makiya claimed that U.S. troops would be greeted with “sweets and flowers,” a phrase widely repeated by war supporters in the months preceding the invasion. This line greatly damaged U.S. war planning and misled both the American people and the American troops who have found themselves greeted not with sweets and flowers but with bullets and bombs. Makiya forged relationships with many important figures in the Bush administration, mostly people with close ties to oil and defense corporations (i.e. Halliburton and Chevron) that stood to profit from the brutal invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, Makiya was a major supporter of Ahmed Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which deliberately fed the Pentagon a great deal of false information about Iraqi WMD and ties to al-Qaida. Large portions of the administration’s misleading evidence for war came straight from the INC while Kanan Makiya was involved with it. Chalabi, ever the con man, has since been discredited by the Americans and is under suspicion in Iraq for counterfeiting and spying for the Iranians.

After Makiya concluded his talk and opened the floor for questions, my hand shot up. I asked him why he would trust the Americans to bring human rights to Iraq given that many of the people in the Pentagon today under Bush served in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon that had a close alliance with Saddam Hussein as he carried out acts of genocide. Throughout the evening, Makiya had made several references to the al-Anfal campaign of the 1980’s wherein Saddam Hussein’s government systematically slaughtered and forcibly relocated much of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Throughout this period of genocide, Saddam had maintained close relations with the Reagan administration. The U.S. government not only turned a blind eye to Iraq’s human rights abuses, but actively assisted them by providing coordinates for chemical attacks on Iranian troops and the helicopters that Saddam used in his infamous chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed roughly 5,000 innocent people. After the attack on Halabja, (which, interestingly enough, the Bush administration used to try to justify its pre-emptive war) Reagan tried to blame the Iranians. Many key Pentagon figures in the Bush administration from Donald Rumsfeld (who met with Saddam as a supportive U.S. envoy in 1983) to Douglas Feith and Richard Perle took an active role in the Pentagon’s policy of supporting Saddam Hussein amidst his unspeakable crimes against humanity. So I wanted to know why Makiya felt comfortable planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq in coordination with many Pentagon figures that had been very close to Saddam under Reagan. If the U.S. invasion was about democracy and human rights, why had the war planners disregarded, if not blatantly supported, genocide in Iraq fifteen years earlier?

Makiya replied to my question in a way that demonstrated he did not feel very confident with his answer. He first suggested that he was trying to give the U.S. a chance to change, as if the former Saddam supporters in the Pentagon felt bad about their roles in genocide and now wanted to make amends. He then seemed to back off from that stance by saying that sometimes you have to support “the lesser of two evils,” a half-way acknowledgement that many of his friends in the Pentagon did not have the best interests of Iraqis in mind when they planned the invasion. While I believe that Makiya, unlike nearly all of the other people who planned and encouraged America’s pre-emptive war, sincerely wanted to build an Iraq that had a place for human rights, I believe that working with Ahmed Chalabi and participating in the Pentagon’s misinformation campaign was an unethical and unacceptable way to achieve such a noble goal- and the results in Iraq have demonstrated that those who planned the war disregarded human rights. Nearly two years after the invasion, American troops and innocent Iraqis are still being killed and maimed daily. Despite Makiya’s and others lofty rhetoric about Iraq’s elections, things have not improved for the Iraqi people. With the chaotic occupation security, violent crimes, especially rape, are commonplace and Saddam’s torture rooms have been replaced by Abu Ghraib and C.I.A. “ghost detainees.” Iraq’s oil is in the process of being privatized and sold off to multinational corporations. For Kanan Makiya to continue his work of promoting human rights in Iraq, he must first admit that he made a huge mistake in participating in the disastrous U.S. war effort.