Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

There was an excellent piece in the October 7 Times Magazine about Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile who was one of the more influential forces driving the liberal ethos behind the invasion. In, “What’s Left?,” his scathing attack on anti-war progressives, leftist British writer Nick Cohen used Makiya as his muppet to make the case for a liberal intervention and, Hitchens-like, was still defending his position earlier this summer when I debated him at the Hay festival. I wonder if Cohen got a chance to read the Magazine this weekend. Especially this passage in which Dexter Filkins describes an exchange which took place between Makiya and some of his fellow Iraqi exiles.

[Makiya] leaned forward to pose a question.

“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.

There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.

“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”

Someone said something about a study.

“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way.

And then there is this appraisal by Ali Allawi, another exiled Iraqi who opposed the invasion but who then served as minister of defense and of trade before quitting the nightmare that had become of his homeland, when the Times writer:

asked Allawi if Makiya, and the others who made the human rights case for war, were not responsible for the disaster that Iraq has turned out to be. “I think they are relieved of responsibility only because I think their influence was far less than they thought it was,” Allawi said. “Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, all of these people became media stars, but their influence on decision making was next to nothing. I can’t believe that a person like Wolfowitz or Cheney or whoever it was in the neocon cabal would allow themselves to be manipulated in this way. They are far too cynical. They have their own agendas. And these agendas were boosted by Iraqis who seemed to be singing from the same song sheet. The Iraqis gave them credibility, gave them substance. But I don’t think they were influenced by them.”

Now substitute the word “liberal” for “Iraqis”… namely those liberals like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman who urged the neocons to war for humanitarian reasons. While Berman ranted about the need to counter a Nazi-like death cult, Hitchens channeled the rage of the Shia and Kurdish populations, who had been most victimized by the Hussein regime. I wonder what they would say of Allawi’s appraisal. Most likely that the intentions of the mission were noble, but the execution was its downfall. And yet now we are seeing even more popular support gather behind the attack on Iran by all major Democrat candidates without much of a whimper from the mainstream outlets who were so easily goaded into acquiescence last time.

If you remember, that began with the Iraq Liberation Act of 2002. Now we have the Kyl-Lieberman amendment which makes terrorists of the Iranian military. Soon we’ll be talking about liberal interventionism again… and out will come the Iranian exiles.

Oh, shit, they’re already in.

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