100% CHANCE, 5% THIS WEEK:

Remembrance day: Kanan Makiya wants his fellow Iraqis to remember what Saddam Hussein did to them, and what they did to each other (Chris Berdik, December 11, 2005, Boston Globe)

Profiled in these pages in November 2002, [Kanan] Makiya was an outspoken and influential supporter of invading Iraq on moral grounds-to rid his native land of Hussein and strike a blow for democracy in a region long dominated by dictatorships and the Islamic extremism they spawned. Allied with the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the pro-war exile group the Iraqi National Congress and now a deputy prime minister of Iraq, Makiya had the ear of the White House, and in January 2003 he assured President Bush that Iraqis would greet American troops ''with sweets and flowers."

But nothing about post-invasion Iraq has been as simple as Makiya and others anticipated, and his argument for a liberal-democratic war has been severely tested. [...]

Over coffee recently in his Cambridge home, surrounded by books shelved from floor to ceiling, and with traces of the Memory Foundation's work sitting in file boxes marked ''documents" and ''oral histories," Makiya spoke of the prospects for a new Iraq and the importance of acknowledging the crimes of the past. A democratic Iraq, says Makiya, ''can only arise in a society that is aware of its own frailties and limitations-that is aware of what it did to itself."

IDEAS: Have your personal views of liberal intervention changed in the aftermath of the invasion?

MAKIYA: I got a number of things wrong, in retrospect. But calling for an intervention, a war, to unseat this regime in Iraq was not one of them. Among my mistakes were underestimating the Baath Party, underestimating the damage done by the sanctions, misjudging the extent to which the state institutions would survive.... But [Iraq] truly was 25 million people without a possibility of hope.... That situation needed a resolution.

In the run-up to the war, I was saying that even if there was just a 5 percent chance of success to build a democracy in Iraq, I thought it was a risk worth taking. Iraq may be a troubled country, may be a country going in all sorts of directions at once, but it is a country that is learning, like an infant in swaddling clothes, to walk in politics for the first time.

[The war] did not go in the facile and simple way that some of us may have painted in the run-up to the war. It turned out to be far more complicated. But that doesn't mean yet that we can make a judgment as to whether we were in error. It will take another generation to judge that in Iraq.

IDEAS: What do you believe is fueling the insurgency now?

MAKIYA: The insurgency is about an old order, that perhaps we underestimated before the war-people like myself underestimated it-that is now at war with the emergent order that was made possible by the US war and occupation of Iraq. At its essence [it] is about Iraqis fighting other Iraqis. It's an incipient civil war.

If universal liberal democracy were easily achieved it woiuldn't have taken us 6,009 years...and counting....

MORE:
Present at the Disintegration (KANAN MAKIYA, 12/11/05, NY Times)

WASHINGTON and Baghdad will be tempted, with the adoption of a new Constitution and the election on Thursday for a four-year government, to declare victory in Iraq. In one sense, they are right to do so. The emerging Iraqi polity undoubtedly represents a radical break not only with the country's past but also with the whole Arab state system established by Britain and France after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

But in the larger sense, such optimism is misguided, for none of the problems associated with Iraq's monumental change have been sorted out. Worse, profound tensions and contradictions have been enshrined in the Constitution of the new Iraq, and they threaten the very existence of the state.

What state? There is no such thing as Iraq and it should and likely will devolve back into three states. What elections will do is show the minority Sunni why this is in their best interest.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2005 8:30 AM