Louis Lingg writes
Dissent Magazine posted the following brief piece by Iraqi dissident architect and author Kanan Makiya (Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, published under the psuedonym Samir Khalil).

I
support a war on the grounds that the current regime of the Ba'ath
Party in Iraq is a criminal state that has gone beyond the pale
even as judged by the very low standards of the Middle East region,
and certainly of the international community. My position rests
on the exceptional nature of Ba'athi totalitarianism in Iraq (and
is therefore not extendable to all the nasty states that exist
in the world). Moreover, it derives from the particular historical
experience-dating back to the 1991 Gulf War-that binds the United
States to Iraq. The outcome of that war, which left the dictator
in place and precipitated one of the harshest sanction regimes
of recent times, places an extraordinary moral responsibility
upon the shoulders of the United States to finish that which it
in a very important sense left unfinished. Such a responsibility
might not exist were it not for that particular historical experience.
One does not transport half a million men halfway across the world
and then leave the people of a country, who were not responsible
for their state's outrage, broken and bleeding for ten years with
no end in sight to the torment that they are going through.



I favor a UN inspection system with reluctance, only because I
hope that it will give greater international legitimacy to what
I think the United States ought to do. I do not think inspections
will work, nor do I think the regime of Saddam Hussein can ever
really allow itself to be totally disarmed. The idea that total
disarmament is the same as "regime change" (an unfortunate
phrase because it stops short of what the regime is being changed
into) troubles me because it makes no sense and highlights just
how deeply conflicted the Bush administration still is over the
political objectives it wants to achieve in Iraq.



I don't like the Bush preemptive war doctrine one bit. There are
far more powerful moral arguments for overthrowing the regime
of Saddam Hussein and replacing it with something better. The
problem with the doctrine is that it substitutes an abstraction,
a mere possibility, for the real suffering of the people of Iraq,
which is a far more convincing reason to go to war.



I would oppose an antiwar movement and do my utmost to point out
that its supporters were playing into the hands of one the nastiest
regimes since the Second World War (according to a special UN
report on human rights abuses in Iraq).



The United States should work with the democratic sections of
the Iraqi opposition to build a radically new kind of Middle Eastern
state, one founded on the rule of law and minority and individual
rights. Such an opposition exists and is working today inside
the Iraqi National Congress. Iraq is not Afghanistan. It is a
potentially rich and already well-developed country with an extensive
infrastructure, a highly literate population, and the human and
financial resources to transform itself. With outside help it
could change from the destructive force it has been in the Middle
East into an agent for democracy and reconstruction. Such a far-reaching
project has the potential of breaking through the logjam of Arab
politics and transforming the relation of the United States to
the whole Arab-Muslim world.



Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and now teaches
at Brandeis University. His books include Republic of Fear:
The Politics of Modern Iraq; Cruelty and Silence: War,
Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World; and The Rock: A Seventh
Century Tale of Jerusalem.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/w i03/symp/makiya.htm"