The Eastern Kanan

The only way to describe the transformation of Kanan Makiya in the leftist imagination is from hero to useless idiot. Before 1991, he was hailed as the "Iraqi Solzhenitsyn" for his methodical exposure of the terror state run by Saddam and company. After he supported the First Gulf War, however, relations began to cool with the New Lefties who thought they'd found their beau ideal in feckless humanitarianism: "Surely, Kanan, everything you say about Baathism is true, but — well, you don't actually expect us to do anything about it?"

For a short while, it looked as if the man everybody wanted to celebrate was — how to put this? — "containable." Tariq Ali, who'd formerly welcomed the Trotskyist into the ever-widening camp of aggrieved post-colonial intellectuals, had to think fast when Makiya started snuggled up to the first Bush regime: "Political innocent" was Ali's designation for his former comrade, who was once experienced enough to be able to tell you about the bastinado torture in Abu Ghraib, or the burlap sacks into which feral cats and supposed enemies of the state were tossed…

Anyway, now everybody is smart enough to know that Makiya's a spiky hedgehog who lucked into a cameo as a fox when it came time for his cause to be taken up by the neoconservative brains trust in Washington. All the old soixante-huitards have left him; Peter Beinart (more of an 89er, really) says he only ever supported the war because Makiya did.

Thinner, and more reminiscent of a 10th grade chemistry teacher than a member of the Fourth International, Makiya still sticks to his principles, and tries to keep away from his in-box:

At first glance, Makiya looks like one of those individuals — many of them former '60s activists who once argued passionately over the Iraq War at Upper West Side book-club meetings and in Brooklyn coffee shops. Makiya, too, has longish, thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, a Leonard Cohen CD collection, and boomer-style taste — with 17 Freud books (from The Interpretation of Dreams to Erich Fromm's Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought) on a shelf in his study. But despite appearances, Makiya is more like a Central European intellectual who came to the United States in the 1980s and believed in Reagan's anti-Soviet vision.

"There's an instant empathy and an instant recognition when we meet up," Makiya says, describing his affinity for Europeans. They have much in common, and former Solidarity leader Adam Michnik supported Makiya's views on Iraq. "In the state of Saddam, the opposition could find a place only in cemeteries," Michnik explained in A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, edited by Thomas Cushman. The Central European optimism about American power and its potential for improving the human condition had once been hard for lefty intellectuals to swallow.

Interventionism's Last Hold-Out | The American Prospect