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Kanan Makiya’s Broken Heart

As a Trotskyist, he should be used to fighting losing struggles. As an architect, he demands order, cohesion, discipline. A bundle of contradictions, perhaps, but this profile of Kanan Makiya is the saddest thing I've read in a long time: 

Makiya is a brilliant and fearless thinker; he dissected a brutal dictatorship and, later, exploded the pieties of his own intellectual culture. And so it is the very shakiness of his answers that suggest that they are, in the end, not about his intellect at all. They’re about his heart. In this case, it seems, Makiya’s heart — his passion to destroy Hussein, his passion to bring freedom to Iraq — does not want him to go where his intellect would take him.

And where would it go? What would it say? Possibly something like this: You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.

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