(Page 2 of 7)

Or has it? Makiya, who is 58, made the toppling of Saddam Hussein his life’s work, the focus of an idealistic vision that guided him through a life of exile. In the musty yearbooks of Baghdad College, the Jesuit high school where Makiya studied, the photo shows his eyes afire: dark, focused and looking upward. As a student at M.I.T., he strummed Woody Guthrie folk tunes on an old guitar. Makiya threw himself into the Palestinian cause, signed on as a Marxist and then beat a long path back to a philosophy of democracy and human rights. In the 1990s, he drafted a charter of democratic first principles for a not-yet-liberated Iraq and called the world’s attention to the Baath Party’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds. And then, in 2003, the hour ringing at last, Makiya threw his support behind the destruction of Hussein’s regime, which had raped and ravaged his countrymen for 24 years, in a war that would have gone forward whether he approved of it or not.

Skip to next paragraph

Kanan Makiya

Makiya (top left) at M.I.T. in 1971.

The ideal and the real. The calculation and the loss. The catastrophe of Hussein and the catastrophe of now. In his book-lined study in Cambridge, Mass., and in the projects that still carry him home to Iraq, Kanan Makiya is trying to figure out how so many irreconcilables could possibly fit together: in America, in Iraq, in himself.

“People say to me, ‘Kanan, this is ridiculous, democracy in Iraq, a complete pipe dream,’ ” Makiya said when I visited him one day. “That’s realism.”

He got up from his chair and walked to a window.

“You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong.”

2. By the time the American invasion began in the spring of 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein appeared to be one of those rare historic moments when the men of force and the men of hope could stand together. For here, in Hussein, was one of the world’s indisputably evil men: he murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule.

Yet for all of that, through the 1980s, the depth and scale of Hussein’s atrocities went largely unnoticed by the wider world. Then, in 1989, came the publication of “Republic of Fear,” written under the name of Samir al-Khalil. In exile circles, the story is well known: Al-Khalil was actually Makiya, who, while working as an architect for his father in London, began researching his book in secret. At first, “Republic of Fear” landed without notice, scarcely moving from the shelves — until August 1990, when Hussein sent his tanks rolling into Kuwait. Overnight, “Republic of Fear” became a sensation, essential to understanding Hussein, and Makiya shortly thereafter revealed his identity. Along the way, he met Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader, who, without knowing the identity of the author and never having heard of Makiya, had bought hundreds of copies of the book and distributed them across the Iraqi exile community. Makiya and Chalabi became united in their obsession.

Following the end of the first gulf war, Makiya became the intellectual force behind the Iraqi opposition. In 1991, he made the first of more than a dozen trips into Iraq’s Kurdish region, then under American protection, documenting the genocidal campaign against the Kurds that Hussein waged in the 1980s. Makiya carried out a suitcase of documents, the first of millions of files on Hussein’s regime that he would assemble over the years. Those formed the basis for what later became the Iraq Memory Foundation, dedicated to preserving the record of Hussein’s crimes.

As Hussein’s end grew near, Makiya pressed harder, presiding over the drafting of a prototype Iraqi constitution, which called for a secular and democratic state. He drew up the initial list of 45 senior Iraqi leaders to be prosecuted for war crimes, a forerunner to the Americans’ famous “deck of cards” with Hussein as the ace of spades. And, overcoming stiff resistance from the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress — the opposition group assembled by Chalabi — Makiya secured a promise of a nationwide amnesty for all Iraqis outside of the highest levels of Hussein’s regime.