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.
In the later months of 2002, he made frequent trips to Washington, where he met with Paul Wolfowitz and other civilians at the Pentagon, and then the hawkish top officials of the vice president’s staff, and then Cheney himself and Condoleezza Rice at the White House. In these meetings, Makiya and the American officials were courting each other and sussing each other out. The Americans wanted the imprimatur of Iraq’s leading intellectual on their war, and they wanted to know what Makiya thought American soldiers would find in Iraq. Makiya wanted to know whether the administration was committed to his vision—a democratic vision for Iraq. The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office said exactly what Makiya wanted to hear. Unlike the career bureaucrats in the State Department, they seemed to feel passionately that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, could be transformed by democracy. They had their reasons for wanting to believe this, reasons that Makiya didn’t entirely share, but the area of overlap was what mattered to him.
“If it is the right thing being done by the wrong people, I would still work with it,” Makiya said when I asked whether his newfound allies worried him at all. “That could very well end up being the case. But politics is far more complicated. I’ve seen so many really good people do such terrible things. It’s very hard to judge any longer.” He rejected the way of thinking that pitted a “Wolfowitz school” against a “Clinton administration school” and passed judgment accordingly. “I suppose one way in which I’ve abandoned ideological politics is I prefer for people to think of me as a moralist more. You have to have moral criteria, constructed in such a general way that you shouldn’t be able to say the wrong people, the right people. It’s not that easy anymore.”
&
nbsp; The test Makiya set was whether those in power were willing to do this moral thing: overthrow Saddam, establish democracy. And the Bush administration, led by its neoconservatives, seemed to be serious about both. For a man with Makiya’s history, this was the promise of deliverance, and he didn’t ask himself whether these Americans, or any Americans, were capable of achieving his goals. He didn’t pause to worry that the damage their policy was doing to the Atlantic alliance and the UN, the arrogant posture of leading administration figures, the questionable claims about WMD and terrorist connections, Rumsfeld’s ideas about military transformation, the history and ideology of Bush’s war cabinet—that all of this might actually contribute to the undoing of his dream. Makiya couldn’t afford to regard these matters as anything but peripheral to the main chance.
Along the way, he was generating plenty of ill will. In the interagency battles between Defense and State, even as he continued working on the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, Makiya sided quite publicly with the Pentagon. His monomaniacal style in the Democratic Principles Working Group bruised the feelings of more than a few of his fellow Iraqi exiles. And he made the fateful choice of linking his reputation with the most controversial exile of them all.
Ahmad Chalabi, the scion of a wealthy and politically powerful Shiite family, had left Baghdad as a teenager in 1958 after the nationalist coup that overthrew the monarchy. He was educated in England and in the United States, where he earned a doctorate in theoretical mathematics at the University of Chicago. But Chalabi made his first fortune and reputation in Jordan, as a banker with close ties to the royal family. He wore English-cut suits and silk ties and was known for his wide-ranging intellect, until he became better known for financial scandal. In 1989, Chalabi’s Petra Bank collapsed, ruining numerous families in Iraq, and he fled Amman to London just ahead of an arrest warrant. When Makiya met him in Salahuddin, Iraqi Kurdistan, in October 1992, at an organizational meeting of the new Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi had recently been convicted in absentia by a Jordanian military tribunal on charges that included embezzlement, theft, and forgery, and sentenced to twenty-two years at hard labor. Chalabi claimed that the charges were politically motivated due to his opposition to the Saddam regime, from which Jordan was getting cheap oil. Jordanian officials have always insisted that Chalabi was a crook. At the very least, he was a careless manager given to self-dealing and sloppy record keeping—practices he kept up as the INC’s chairman once the CIA, which played a central role in creating the organization after the Gulf War, began financing the INC with tens of millions of dollars. The agency also helped to transform Ahmad Chalabi from disgraced banker into opposition leader. Within a few months of his April 1992 conviction, he was already climbing his way to the top of Iraqi exile politics.
The shady past didn’t interest Makiya. He was drawn instead to Chalabi’s mind. They were seatmates on a flight once in 1994, and when Chalabi got up to use the lavatory, Makiya glanced at the book he’d been reading: a thick tome on the reconstruction of Germany after World War II. It was the beginning of a long mutual attraction. In Chalabi, Makiya saw a brilliant palace politician, a product of the monarchy when Iraq had a parliament and educated, secular men led the country. Makiya admitted that Chalabi had no practical experience of democratic politics. His rise to the top of the INC had nothing to do with elections. “His biggest failing is he operates like one of these nineteenth-century, T. E. Lawrence–type figures, behind the scenes—cloakroom, big-power politics. Mass politics mean nothing to him.” Nonetheless, Makiya convinced himself that Chalabi shared his liberal democratic beliefs. He also believed that the INC, unlike the established parties, which were founded years ago in the image of the Baath Party, “is porous, it’s open, it doesn’t work as a clandestine organization. It could never conspire.” Makiya saw in Chalabi a man of the future, a leader of independent-minded Iraqis who had already freed themselves from the region’s failed ideologies. “He’s not got a shred of Arab nationalist politics in him,” Makiya told me. “He doesn’t think like an Arab or a Shiite or a religious person. He’s the most likely of all those capable of leading Iraq to go in a democratic direction.”
The INC in its early days was an umbrella organization of Iraqi dissidents that included communists, monarchists, Islamists, Kurds, ex-Baathists, ex–military officers, and assorted liberals—including Kanan Makiya—in an uneasy and often unruly cohabitation. Chalabi maneuvered his way into the chairmanship of the INC and eventually set up its headquarters in the fashionable London neighborhood of Knightsbridge. But with the INC’s botched coup attempts and bloody setbacks of the mid-1990s, Chalabi and his Washington benefactors turned on one another. From that point on, CIA and State regarded Chalabi with unconcealed suspicion and disdain. The agency began to look for other white knights, and it peeled the Kurdish, Shiite, and ex-military parties away from the INC’s leadership.
Noah Feldman, a law professor who served as a constitutional adviser to the occupation authority in Iraq, called Chalabi “the Jay Gatsby of the Iraq War.” After 1996, Chalabi set about to reinvent himself again. Out of favor with the Clinton administration, he abandoned his doomed efforts to overthrow Saddam from Iraqi Kurdistan and established a new base of operations, in Washington, with a new plan. Assisted by his young American representative, Francis Brooke—an evangelical Christian and PR man who had first met Chalabi in London while on the CIA’s payroll—Chalabi began to court the Republican right. His Virgil through Washington’s purgatory was Richard Perle, who introduced Chalabi to a network of backers at such institutions as the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and the Gingrich Congress. Chalabi also ingratiated himself with Dick Cheney, who was running the Halliburton Corporation, with Paul Wolfowitz, who saw in Chalabi a like-minded intellectual, and with congressional conservatives like Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, and Newt Gingrich. These Republicans were all too happy to turn Clinton’s failures in Iraq against the president.
And here was an Iraqi who was saying all the right things. In June 1997, Chalabi told an audience at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs—the group that had sponsored the conference from which the “Clean Break” strategy paper issued—that the INC could overthrow Saddam with modest American help and establish a democratic state with friendly ties to Israel. The INC also seemed to produce an inexhaustible supply of defectors with top-secret information about Saddam’s efforts to rebuild his unconventional weapons programs and his terrorist training camps. When Congress passed and a politically weakened Clinton was forced to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, the INC became the beneficiary of millions of more dollars in government funding. Chalabi played the partisan wars of the late Clinton years in Washington perfectly, and he made himself the favorite Iraqi of the Republicans who were about to come back to power.
So when the new Bush administration got serious about regime change; not in principle and through the dubious cadres of Iraqi exile groups but with the full might of the American military, it was natural that Kanan Makiya and Ahmad Chalabi should turn to each other. “Ahmad needed a thinker, a liberal democratic thinker. He found Kanan,” a friend of both men told me. “Kanan needed a strong man committed to his ideas of liberal democracy, and he couldn’t find anyone but Chalabi.” Makiya inherited Chalabi’s old wars with agencies of the U.S. government—the State Department, the CIA—and made them his own; but unlike Chalabi, Makiya wasn’t a born politician, and he handled his new role without the necessary smoothness and legerdemain. Feisal Istrabadi, a tough-talking Chicago lawyer whose family had lived near the Chalabis in Baghdad before 1958, first met Makiya at an opposition gathering in June 2002. “Kanan said to me that Iraq has one democrat—Ahmad Chalabi,” said Istrabadi, who would become Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the UN in the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. “My response was, ‘If there’s only one democrat, so much for democracy in Iraq.’ He was a religious zealot of Ahmad’s, and he promoted the
neocons’ view, the Defense Department’s view, that the Future of Iraq Project was going to weaken Ahmad. He opposed the project because a wider net weakened Ahmad—he used those words.”
That same month of June, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who would oversee planning for postwar Iraq, invited Istrabadi to the Pentagon. Feith had one question: Whom did Istrabadi support in the Iraqi opposition? “I knew the answer he wanted,” Istrabadi told me, “but I said, ‘I support the principles of the INC.’” That wasn’t good enough. Within a month, the civilians at the Pentagon who had been courting Istrabadi dropped him, and by the end of the year their hostility was undisguised. In the meantime, Makiya had changed his mind and joined the Democratic Principles Working Group. Istrabadi, who was also a member, soon realized that Makiya, as head of the coordinating committee, wanted to take control of writing the report. Some members dropped out; others were pushed aside. The feuds within the U.S. government spilled over into the group. In England for the first formal session, Istrabadi was startled one evening to find Tom Warrick of the State Department and Samantha Ravich from Cheney’s office standing on the sidewalk outside a fancy London restaurant, screaming at each other. “That was the first time I realized how deeply personal the fight between the neocons and those who knew what they were talking about was.”
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