“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” asks Kanan Makiya
October 6, 2007 Iraq No CommentsDexter Filkins, Regrets Only? New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2007
The conversation drifted along on a cloud of agreement until Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, leaned forward to pose a question.
“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.
There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.
“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”
Someone said something about a study.
“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way.
That moment in Dokan encapsulated the terrible paradox of the Iraq war and, for Makiya, a crushing turn in a long personal journey. Over the last 25 years, Makiya, a secular Shiite, born of a British mother and educated in the United States, had become the foremost chronicler of Saddam Hussein’s crimes and the most persuasive voice for ending his reign. Makiya’s book “Republic of Fear,” published in 1989, laid bare not merely the murderous ways of Hussein’s Baath Party but its terrible soul. “Cruelty and Silence,” published after the first Persian Gulf war, posed a devastating critique of the Arab world’s intelligentsia, whose anti-Americanism, Makiya argued, had prompted it to conspire in a massive, collective silence over Hussein’s dungeons.
