Kanan Makiya speaks

Here's something that should be read in full: the interview with Kanan Makiya in Democratiya. A few pertinent excerpts:

In the second part of the book [Cruelty and Silence]... I pit the words of Arab and western intellectuals of my generation, many of the left, against all these Iraqi words about violence and cruelty. The point was that between the two sets of words there was a chasm. The intellectuals offered rhetoric about 'nationalism', 'Imperialism', 'the Crusades', and so on. The focus of the book was about the rhetoric that the war [the Gulf War in 1991] had generated and the chasm between that rhetoric and the reality. Between these two realities - the words of the intellectuals and the words of the victims - was a yawning gap.
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The positive element which I carried from the Trotskyist movement, from the writings of Trotsky himself, was an internationalist spirit.
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I am not saying that intervention is always a good thing. I argued for intervention in Iraq because of particular circumstances. First, the exceptional nature of the Saddam Hussein regime. Second, the world owed the people of Iraq after putting them in the straightjacket of sanctions for 12 years and giving them no way out. The country was rotting. Society was rotting. Sanctions weren't working. The regime was not toppling from within. You either remove the regime or you re-legitimise the regime. Continuing with the status quo was morally unacceptable. The price being paid inside Iraq was too high. The case for war, the case for regime change, can be made on many levels in the Iraqi case. These don't necessarily apply elsewhere. They certainly don't apply for Syria, or Iran today. Everything has to be looked at in terms of the concrete circumstances.
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It's not just the left. People like myself, those of us who went into Iraq after April and March 2003 as part of the effort to transform this country, have felt betrayed by Europe as a whole. We were attacked by the media of all the surrounding countries, countries utterly hostile to the sort of values on which Europe rests. Satellite stations distorted what was going on. The silence in Europe at that moment gave enormous sustenance to all those forces struggling against the transformation of Iraq. It enabled the Jihadis, the Ba'athists, the extreme Arab nationalists, and the Arab regimes, to say 'Look at the hostility of Europe to what the United States has done!' Europe made it possible to isolate not just the United States but everything that is represented by the west. Europe gave strength to the argument that it was a traditional colonist land grab or oil grab, which was nonsense, of course.