Kanan Makiya speaks up on Iraq
This is a great interview with Kanan Makiya on Iraq.
Kanan Makiya: I’ve reached a point where I don’t even bother to reply to such critics. They are just not serious people any more; they are expressions of failure, inactivity, and irresponsibility, rather than critics of substance and with serious ideas. My case has always rested on an Iraqi perspective, on what is in the best interests of the 25 million or so people of Iraq. That’s very important and something that people don’t often see. It was the best thing that ever happened to me when I shed those kind of abstract rubrics which for so many years enabled me to hide from the defence of Iraqi interests as I saw them. Abstract categories like ‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘anti-Zionism’ concealed behind them a cover-up for terrible things that were taking place inside Iraq, things that are implicitly condoned by people like Chomsky and Said. I can’t engage in that kind of obfuscation any more. The be-all and end-all of politics for me is tyranny and totalitarian dictatorship. That was the theme of Republic of Fear and it was the main theme of Cruelty and Silence.
When there is abuse of human beings, there is no longer any philosophical or political argument that I can tolerate listening to if it justifies or somehow legitimates the continuation of that abuse. If there is any course of action that can diminish or eradicate the sources of that abuse from the world it seems to me that the high moral ground of politics is to call for it. And the left, by no longer doing so, has really lost its place in the world, and that is a sad thing and something I deplore. These accusations about Bush and the so-called neo-cons (a phrase, by the way, that I don’t think has any clear meaning) conceal a failure on the part of people like Chomsky and Said to understand that human suffering is orders of magnitude more important than how much they like or dislike the US or the person of Bush, or even whether one likes this or that position of the United States. If I can reduce the amount of human suffering in the world by even a jot, if it is possible to demonstrate that overall suffering has been reduced, then the right position in politics is always to be for that reduction.
Alan Johnson: And are you still confident that a ‘cost benefit analysis’ would show a reduction of suffering in Iraq?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. Ask Iraqis themselves. 14 million people voted [in the December 2005 poll). Everyday the media inundates us with images of terrorist attacks and gore. But in a whole slew of polls 70- 80% of Iraqis are still shown to be ‘optimistic’ about the future! That’s a remarkable statistic. One needs to ask what it means. What does it say about what they came out of to be so optimistic about the future at this moment?
And no, I’m not officially resurrecting the blog.