ABSTRACT
Kanan Makiya’s speech at an NYU panel discussion on November 22, 2002 was a turning point in post-9/11, pre-“Shock and Awe” discourse on the future of Iraq. His case for Democracy Now! galvanized some liberal intellectuals. (Last year, The New Republic’s editor, Peter Beinart, ruefully allowed that when his puzzled wife asked him how he’d ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq, he had a simple answer: “Because Kanan Makiya did.”) The interest of Makiya’s “electric” remarks, however, went beyond his eloquent argufying for a humanist politics in the Middle East. His talk exposed “the lack of trust-the foundational political disagreement” that existed between Colin Powell’s State Department and the office of the Vice President. A rift that would have heavy consequences after regime change in Iraq. Makiya’s remarks are reprinted below along with an exchange between him and Mansour Farhang, a former Iranian ambassador to the UN who was forced to flee Iran after Khomeini consolidated power there in the early ’80s. Various other panelists (Todd Gitlin, Michael Walzer, et al.) have recalled with satisfaction their own “answers” to Makiya that evening, but it was the call and response between the two Middle Easterners that was most telling.
