By challenging religious orthodoxy, Kanan Makiya has offended Left and Right, Jew and Muslim
Kanan Makiya has a good claim to be the Solzhenitsyn of Saddam's Iraq, if such a grand title can be given to a modest scholar who offers you coffee and digestives in his London flat. In the mid 1980s, he wrote Republic of Fear, a remorseless chronicle of murder and torture in a prison state. Seventy publishers returned the manuscript before the University of California Press accepted it.
One of the best descriptions of state terror from the crowded twentieth-century field was met with silence. The West and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies supported Saddam and the Western Left was afflicted with a kind of Orientalism which indulged, and continues to indulge, Arab despotism. Very few outsiders wanted to know about Saddam's crimes until he suddenly grew horns when his troops invaded Kuwait.
A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.
He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution.