Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-British academic and a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention for calling attention to the human rights abuses in Saddam's Iraq in Cruelty and Silence, and accusing Arab intellectuals and Western Leftists of turning a blind eye to these abuses under the pretense of anti-imperialism. Makiya would later lobby the US government to invade Iraq in 2003 to oust Hussein.

Makiya was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later founding Makiya Associates in order to design and build projects in the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the 2003 Iraq War. His life is documented in British journalist Nick Cohen's book What's Left.

Makiya began his political career as a Trotskyist and became closely identified with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Schwartz. In 1981, Makiya left the practice of architecture to write, using the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family. In Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he argues that Iraq had become a full-fledged totalitarian state, worse than despotic states such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia. His next book, The Monument (1991), is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch.

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