"Getting closer to Saddam"

Dexter Filkin's profile of a chastened Kanan Makiya is heartbreaking, in some ways, but also a telling reminder of the weird forces that drove us into the disastrous occupation of Iraq: idealists like Makiya provided idealist cover for the duplicitous Chalabi, who in turn worked to advance the agenda of the neocons looking for an "example" for a reshaped Middle East who, finally basking in the light of power, made sure to stroke the ego of a deluded GW Bush. All the while the press and the pundits cheered on the noble cause of these disparate agendas.

Dokan, Iraq They were well into their dinner when the talk turned to the most troubling question of all. The guests, brought here to discuss plans for the American University of Iraq, had been passing around platters of shabbout, an oily and bony fish, in the dining room of a villa owned by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, when the question came up. The six Iraqis and one Lebanese-American had gathered in this lakeside guesthouse in the mountains of Kurdistan, far from the furies of Baghdad and Basra. No one had actually posed the question; it crept up on its own. Among Iraqi exiles, particularly those who had been instrumental in persuading the Americans to invade, it was still something of a taboo.

“Leave Saddam in power?” asked Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, holding court in the middle. “So that he would be free to continue killing, free to invade his neighbors, so that he would be free to — I am sorry — develop nuclear weapons?” He shook his head. “No.”

This was not the idle banter of an American talk show. While still in high school, Salih, today one of Iraq’s most dedicated and capable public servants, had been jailed and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. As many as 180,000 of his fellow Kurds had been murdered in what people here still call “the War of Annihilation.”

Then came Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins professor of Middle East history, a Lebanese-American intimately identified with the Iraqi project. The American invasion of Iraq, Ajami said between bites of fish, would yet prove to be a transforming moment in the region. “Persuading the Americans to take down Saddam was Chalabi’s finest hour,” Ajami said, referring to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi. 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.