t only when defined in fat volumes and not delivered as a meaningless sound-bite. Packer uses this dynamic between the grandly abstract and the hard facts to develop the tension in his book, contrasting the slippery, often fantastical process of thinking that led to Iraq’s invasion with the disaster that followed.
I wonder how many Iraqis would agree with Beaumont’s contemptuous dismissal of freedom in Iraq as an abstraction, a meaningless sound-bite. Easy to say, no doubt, for someone who’s never lived under a terror regime, never had to monitor every word in case a casual comment resulted in a visit by the Secret Police and perhaps the chance to watch your daughter being raped and tortured. But, unthinkable as it may be for some in the West, there are countries where the idea of freedom isn’t taken for granted, just as there was a time when it wasn’t taken for granted here. Heck, some people even fought and died for it.
As for the contention that US operations in Iraq “have never served any political goal that could be realised”, well, there are no doubt many criticisms to be made of the way the invasion and occupation have been conducted, but it takes a special effort of will to ignore the fact that the major purpose of the invasion, to overthrow Saddam’s regime, was, to judge from the fact that Saddam is now on trial, completely successful. As for establishing the groundwork for a new democratic Iraq, it may for Beaumont be a complete waste of time, but millions of Iraqis didn’t seem to think so when they went out to vote, and it seems a pity, to say the least, to condemn their efforts with sneers.
So far so poor then, but this is plain nasty:
Packer [author of “The Assassins’ Gate”, one of the books under review] uses the device of following the progress of a single figure as a motif of the book. That figure is Kanan Makiya, a friend of Packer and author of Republic of Fear, a reconstruction of the brutality of Saddam’s regime, who emerges as a vain, egotistical figure with little knowledge of his own country, whose personality disintegrates in the face of the challenging realities of postwar Iraq.
Nothing like an ad hominem attack when you have no arguments, though Makiya has had plenty of opportunity to get used to this kind of stuff: Edward Said wrote about “Cruelty and Silence“, ‘Most of what Makiya wrote in the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists’, and Makiya talks about the character assassination he underwent at the time in his interview with Alan Johnson in the latest Democratiya – an interview, it should be noted, where he doesn’t exactly come across as someone whose personality has disintegrated.
Interestingly in Christopher Hitchens’ (positive) review of The Assassins’ Gate (scroll down, “from Publishers Weekly”) he mentions “the impressive exile Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya”. Hmm.
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