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Sifting Through Five Years of WarKanan Makiya takes readers' questions about Iraq.


Posted Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 3:20 PM ET

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Kanan Makiya: I don't agree. The U.S. lost control of security on day one, with the outbreak of looting. Iraqis are a people that had known nothing but a surplus of security. To suddenly take all that away and say, in effect, you are on your own, was unforgivable. They felt that no one was in control. And when your whole world is being turned upside down, the feeling that no one is in control is terrifying, and consequently it is conducive of the most irrational forms of behavior.

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Austin, Texas: You focus, understandably, on the consequences of the invasion for the people of Iraq. Certainly that's enormously important. But from a U.S. perspective, it's also necessary to ask whether the U.S. is better off now than it would have been with Saddam in power. Given the cost in U.S. lives, money and international standing, it seems clear to me that the answer is no. What do you think?

Kanan Makiya: Sadly, viewed in the very short run, I think you may be right. But what happens after an overly hasty US withdrawal leads the whole region into turmoil. The US entered Iraq, but the whole region has been affected and is today in a state of upheaval—not because of the US action in Iraq alone, but because there is a deep malaise in Arab politics that has been in the making since 1967. That malaise has already spread out and affected the West in 9/11, and it will no doubt continue to affect Europe especially in the years to come. For better or worse we live in a deeply interconnected world.

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Princeton, N.J.: I never said we committed atrocities—I meant we wrecked the country. Look at pictures of Basra before the invasion and compare them with today's. How many Iraqis have died in just five years because of our acts? One in five have been forced out of their homes. Are they better off now than under Saddam?

Kanan Makiya: You—i.e., the U.S.—didn't wreck Iraq a fraction as much as we—i.e., Iraqis—did. The looting for instance destroyed orders of magnitude more infrastructure than the war ever did.

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Dorchester, Mass.: Saddam Hussein was not a good leader. Did the people of Iraq ever get close to removing him themselves? If so, did our interference cause that homegrown rebels to cease to exist?

Kanan Makiya: The nature of Saddam's system of government was such as to render his removal from inside an impossibility. The only opposition inside Iraq was a dead opposition. How such an admittedly bizarre state of affairs came into being is something I have written a great deal about (Republic of Fear).

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Anonymous: Prior to the US invasion, Iraq was somewhat of a buffer state between Shia Iran and the Sunni Middle East. Iraq had Sunni/Shia intermarriage, dating and shared neighborhoods. This buffer is now broken and Iran seems to be the better for it. Doesn't this raise the chances of a regional war in the Mddle East as the Sunni Arabs seek to tamp down Iran's growing strength? Is this what George Bush meant by fighting them over there—hoping to cause a regional conflict so that both sides would be too busy killing one another to plan attacks on the U.S.?

Kanan Makiya: Islam itself is you could say undergoing its own civil war, its own wars of reformation (think of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries) and Iraq is at the moment one of the prime battlefields. I don't think that this has anything to do with George Bush

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New York: What is your opinion of the "surge"?

Kanan Makiya: It is a short term strategy that is working, but only in the short term.

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Bethesda, Md.:"The U.S. has not committed atrocities in Iraq that are even remotely comparable to what Saddam did." Wow. Way to twist Princeton's point to avoid giving a real response. How about you try to answer the question he or she actually posed?

Kanan Makiya: Iraq was far more dangerous to the region—the Middle East—than the reprehensible Saudi regime is or ever will become. It had after all launched two deeply destructive wars, and was intent on becoming hegemonic in the region.

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Kanan Makiya: Thank you all for participating. I must say good-bye now.

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Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad and now teaches at Brandeis University and directs the Iraq Memory Foundation, based in Baghdad. His books include Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq; The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and Responsibility in Iraq; Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, and Uprising in the Arab World; and The Rock: A Tale of 7th-Century Jerusalem.
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