Iraq Needed a Benign Dictator

Interview by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-born, MIT-trained architect, is a professor at Brandeis University and the author of "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq." The book, which details human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein, was published under a pseudonym in 1989. Makiya, an active member of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, was among the most vocal Iraqi exiles encouraging the Bush administration to oust Hussein.

Is Iraq in the midst of a civil war ?

We're teetering on the edge of one, and I think as always, politics is going to be the deciding factor. By politics, I mean leadership politics, which has been sorely lacking in Iraq.

Before the war, many Iraqi exiles predicted that the Iraqi people would unite behind moderate leaders. Where are those leaders, and why haven't we seen more moderation?

The failure lies in the inability of Iraqi leaders to rise above their own groups and confessional allegiances. We have not had a visionary, a leader able to think beyond the self-interest of their group. So we have a politics of selfishness . . . [and] a politics of victimhood, an elevation of victimhood into a quality as though it were something in and of itself. In particular, this applies to the Shiite leadership.

Why hasn't a more unifying leader risen from the Shiite community? Where is Iraq's Nelson Mandela or Hamid Karzai ?

We're talking about a completely new elite that has had no experience of government before. They have created a Shiite political organization, identifying Shiiteness over Iraqiness. This, I feel, is the source of their failure. Their interpretation of democracy . . . is of democracy being majority rule as opposed to minority rights.

When you remove the suffocating lid of dictatorship, a dictatorship that has oppressed on the basis of ethnic identity, then it is very natural that those who have been so repressed react by being assertive -- the very thing that has been denied from the days of [Saddam] Hussein. And that is what we are watching today.

Could the Americans have done anything differently from the outset to reduce the chances of sectarian politics and civil strife we're now seeing today? Before the war, you advocated the formation of a provisional government led by Iraqis in exile. Do you still believe that was the right way to go?

There's this old thorn . . . and that is the issue of provisional government versus occupation. Occupation was the wrong formula for dealing with the transition. The U.S. government pushed aside the Iraqi opposition -- both those groups that were in exile and those groups that were inside Iraq, mainly the Kurds. The unwillingness, for instance, to involve the Kurds in deliberations on Iraq as a whole because of how that may look in the rest of the Arab world was a big mistake, I think. The unwillingness to have the Iraqis keep their army. That was another mistake. But that goes hand in glove with the idea of occupation as opposed to a provisional government like what was done in Afghanistan. So what we ended up with was the rhetoric of liberation but the reality of occupation.

Isn't it interesting that 80 to 90 percent of those very same characters who were waltzing in and out of Washington before the war today have been quote-unquote legitimized through elections. Look at the political elite, look at the names, they're all there -- the very same people. But what we have lost in the meantime is three years, a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of bad relations and so on.