r_1_8_1/202-5403596-8940647″>Cruelty and Silence. Here‘s an interview with him, mainly about the Iraq Memory Foundation, which he was instrumental in setting up (via Milt’s File). He also makes some more general remarks:
Arab political culture is “infected,” as Makiya puts it, and is now at its lowest ebb ever. He speculates that defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 was so painful that Arabs are in denial about their society. For him it is crucial that no more generations are brought up on “the cruelties of Arab nationalism.” We are now “at a turning-point,” he says, “The West could engage with the Arab world without supporting dictatorships.” Democracy is “doable,” in a favorite word of his. All the same, current violence has obliged him to postpone his return to Baghdad. “I’m on all sorts of death lists: Ex-Baathists, foreign Arab insurgents, and so on would like to kill me.”
The violence in Fallujah, as he sees it, was essentially a local issue involving small numbers of Iraqis and non-Iraqis. Events in Najaf, in contrast, can jeopardise the country’s future. Makiya unhesitatingly calls the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr a thug. “Moqtada is totally the product of the Baathist system and its criminal elements, he’s using the only methods he knows, and he can’t be allowed to get away with it. Otherwise he’ll go on to represent the remnants of the old regime among the Shiites, and reproduce it.” Moqtada’s henchmen murdered the rival and moderate Ayatollah al-Khoie – one of the killers is in American custody – and this has to be a matter for the courts. The Shiites must resolve the confrontation with Moqtada for themselves, “in-house,” to use another favorite word of Makiya’s. “You can’t expect the Sunnis to participate, and the Kurds have a specific agenda. The burden of the country lies with wise and responsible Shiite leadership.” He’s not going to criticise American policy except to say, “Lack of reliance on Iraqis is the problem.”
The programme he originally sketched out for Chalabi and the INC still stands, he hopes: expand and re-jig the Governing Council after June 30, choose a prime minister, find a cabinet, devise tripartite power-sharing between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, hold elections next year for a Constituent Assembly – that’s the really critical step – appoint a committee out of it to approve the constitution, and then have a referendum to legitimise what’s been done. It’s doable.
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