HAVING BEATEN THE ODDS ISN'T A START?:

The last liberal hold-out: In 2002, many on the left believed the U.S. could help Iraqis. For those who weren't sure, Kanan Makiya helped push them over the edge (Tara McKelvey, July 1, 2007, Dallas Morning News)

Kanan Makiya, a 57-year-old Brandeis University professor, is looking for a file he has misplaced in his study at home in Cambridge, Mass. He wonders aloud where the file, which includes angry e-mails from anti-war activists, might be, and a question hangs in the air: How is it possible to address such people when you were one of the Iraq war's key proponents and you remain unrepentant? It seems hopeless.

There was a time when Mr. Makiya had plenty of support and was surrounded by friends. Writers who once shared many of his views included Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of The New Republic; Paul Berman, author of Power and the Idealists; and George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.

Now they see things differently. [...]

Back in 2002, however, many liberals believed Americans could help Iraqis. And for those who weren't sure, well, Mr. Makiya helped push them over the edge.

With his longish, thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like many of the former '60s activists who once argued passionately over the Iraq war. But Mr. Makiya is more like a Central European intellectual who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and believed in Ronald Reagan's anti-Soviet vision.

The Central European optimism about American power and its potential for improving the human condition had once been hard for lefty intellectuals to swallow. In the 1990s, as Mr. Rieff explained, things changed. Liberal writers and political thinkers were flush with the success of helping out in the Balkans and horrified by the knowledge that American inertia may have led to genocide in Rwanda. By 2002, many were passionate about the same things Mr. Makiya cared about – freedom and democracy – and shared his exuberance over the role of the U.S.

Those who were not swept up in the moment – such as Michael Walzer, co-editor of Dissent and an Iraq war opponent – still felt his power.

On Nov. 22, 2002, Mr. Walzer and Mr. Makiya appeared at a New York University event titled "Ambiguities of Intervention: Iraq and After." Mr. Walzer raised doubts about the sagacity of the Iraq war. Then Mr. Makiya spoke.

"There is absolutely no discussion among Iraqis about whether or not regime change is a good thing," Mr. Makiya said, according to OpenDemocracy.net. "It is simply taken for granted that it is." If there is "even a slim chance" of bringing democracy to Iraq, he said, "you have a moral obligation to pursue it."

"The room exploded in applause," Mr. Packer wrote in The New York Times Magazine.

Mr. Walzer tells me he admired his fellow speaker's "passion and persuasiveness," but he also recalls that Mr. Makiya said "the chance of establishing a democracy in Iraq was one in 10. I said we did not have a right to bring a full-scale war given Kanan Makiya's estimates of the chances of success."

Kind of sad to hear the Decent Left accuse the war of turning into an imperialist enterprise when their specific complaint is that, given democratic power, the Iraqis haven't chosen the sort of state that secularists want them to.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2007 6:54 AM