Mick Hartley

It’s always interesting to read what Kanan Makiya has to say. Unfortunately there’s only a limited opportunity in this interview in the NYT (via Clive D). The interviewer, Dexter Filkins, goes back to Makiya’s pre-invasion enthusiasm:

Two months before the war started, in a meeting in the Oval Office, Makiya told President Bush that Iraqis would greet invading American soldiers with “sweets and flowers.”

Now, of course, those dreams are gone, carried away on a tide of blood. The catastrophe in Iraq has thoroughly undermined the idea of democratic change in the Middle East. It has undercut the notion, sustained by the successful interventions in the Balkans, that American military power can achieve humanitarian ends. And it has made Makiya and the others who justified the invasion look reckless and naïve.

That pretty much sets the tone. Tide of blood….catastrophe….reckless and naïve. It’s an invitation to Makiya to repent. Which he refuses to do:

“Nothing was inevitable. People made choices. Everything was in flux. It could have gone so many different ways. The real tragedy that we are facing now is why Iraqis are not making the right choices, why we are missing all the opportunities.”

This isn’t good enough for Filkins, who supplies his own summary:

You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.

Well, that’s Kanan Makiya put in his place. And, in case we missed it the first time, up pops that catastrophe again. I wonder how many Iraqis would endorse that description, in comparison with what went before.

It’s not all glib dismissals though. This section is interesting – about Makiya’s Iraq Memory Foundation:

Since 2003, Makiya and his small staff have scoured Baath party offices and dungeons, adding to a collection that would reach more than 11 million pages of records. And they began filming interviews with the regime’s victims…

Among the foundation’s most vivid achievements are the 190 videotaped testimonies from Hussein’s victims. They include Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and even Jews. In December 2003, at the age of 98, Shao’ul Sasson, for example, described his arrest and torture at the hands of the Baath Party police. Sasson, who died in 2005, was an Iraqi Jew. As late as the mid-1930s, Baghdad was one of the world capitals of Jewish life, with Jews making up a third of its population. Most of Iraq’s Jews either fled to Israel or were expelled beginning in the late 1940s; most of the rest were harassed or killed. In January 1969, in one of the Baath Party’s first displays of public brutality, 13 Iraqi Jews and 4 other men were hanged in a public ceremony in Baghdad before a crowd of about a half million people. Iraqis were bussed in from around the country to witness the event.

“I was born in Baghdad,” Sasson says on the videotape. “My father was the chief rabbi. He sent me to a Jewish school to learn Hebrew, but I can’t remember much of it.

“I was working for Mohammed alDamarchi. My salary had been stopped because I was Jewish, and there was a warrant out for my arrest. They knocked on the door and asked for Shao’ul.

“My wife said, ‘Let him take his clothes or put something on,’ but they said there was no need, as I would be brought back soon. They blindfolded me and took me away. I could tell we were going to the notorious Al-Nihaya Palace prison, because I lived in the same area. . . . They asked me to confess to everything, but I told them I didn’t have anything to confess to. And yet they insisted I must. They brought a metal bar and hit me on my legs. I fell into the wall and broke two teeth. Again, they told me to confess and hit me on the legs. Again, I fell and broke a few teeth. I lost 9 or 10 teeth that day.

“I saw Abdul Rahman al-Bazzaz (the former prime minister). They had hung him up and burned his tongue with matches. . . . My worst experience was the day I saw all the prisoners hanging up on either side of the corridor.

“They put me in a cell where the floor was covered in urine and feces. I couldn’t bear to stay in it, so I would bang my head hard against the wall in an attempt to kill myself.”

A brief glimpse into the nightmare of Saddam’s regime – compared to which, remember, the current post-Saddam situation, with all its dangers yet also with all its hopes, can only be described as a catastrophe. And a worthwhile reminder that there were two sides to the story of forced emigrations in that post-war period.