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It was the amnesty, Makiya says now, that was to be the essence of the new Iraq that he imagined, and that he imagined was possible. The idea was that, under Hussein, nearly all Iraqis had suffered — not just the Kurds and the Shiites, but even the Sunnis, the minority from which Hussein had come. For that reason, Makiya argued, revenge in a post-Hussein Iraq would not only be pointless but impossible if the country were to survive. To Makiya, it seemed obvious that a totalitarian regime so pervasive in its reach had left no corner of the country untouched.

“Under Saddam, the overwhelming majority of people had been brutalized, and this brutalization had led to a very deep atomization of the society — of the destruction of the Iraqi identity,” Makiya told me during one of the conversations I had with him over the summer. “And so I asked myself: how can I find hope in this darkness? Upon what do you hang a new Iraqi sense of identity?”

He answered his own question: “I am saying, we are going to remember the pain. Let us find, in that pain, common ground. We are going to say that we are Iraqis, and we are held together by this.”

Makiya was betting that Iraq would turn out like South Africa or the former East Germany, where widespread reprisals were avoided. Makiya even toured the old headquarters of the Stasi, the secret police of the defunct East German state, which has since been converted to an archival center. There, the former citizens of East Germany can view their files to see what their old government did to spy on them. Makiya envisioned similar things for Iraq, including a South African-style truth commission, where the functionaries of Hussein’s regime could confess their crimes without fear of prosecution.

The fact that both South Africa and East Germany were exceptions to the rule that revolutions are bloody affairs was not lost on Makiya. Yes, he says, he considered the possibility that Iraq could turn out like Yugoslavia, that it could implode or come apart. But that possibility did not dissuade him. The Iraqis were ready for democracy, Makiya believed, they were ready to forgive.

And — this is the crucial point — even if the Iraqis were not ready, Makiya argued, the regime in Baghdad was so wrecked that destroying it was worth the gamble anyway. “I think there’s a less than 5 percent chance that what I’d like to see happen actually happens,” Makiya told The Boston Globe in the autumn of 2002. “But it seems to me an obligation, even if it’s a 5 percent chance, to try to make it happen. You could call it a triumph of hope over experience. But what else is politics if not that?”

3. The exiles returned as Hussein fell, most of them scrambling for power or money in the new Iraqi state. Makiya returned, too, but tended to stay away from politics. Instead, he set up the 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.

Makiya’s dream was to build a museum for the archives on the site of the Victory Arch, the memorial commissioned by Hussein to commemorate Iraq’s so-called triumph in the Iran-Iraq War. The monument, now inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, depicts two pairs of enormous hands crossing swords 140 feet above the street. Serving as the monument’s base are 5,000 Iranian helmets taken from the battlefield.

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.