The Dream of the Exiled Anti-Saddamites was in Fact a Nightmare that's Come True

Query: You watch the radical right in the America fuel the destruction of Saddam's Iraq after Gulf War I then you push for an invasion to kick Saddam out (because the Iraqis can't be made to rebel) and you expect what? A better Iraq? How does one achieve that level of stupidity? These exiles are in fact traitors, every last one of them.

Dexter Filkins, in a profile of one Saddam-hating exile in the freedom of Boston:

Then came Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins professor of Middle East history, a Lebanese-American intimately identified with the Iraqi project. The American invasion of Iraq, Ajami said between bites of fish, would yet prove to be a transforming moment in the region. “Persuading the Americans to take down Saddam was Chalabi’s finest hour,” Ajami said, referring to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi. The conversation drifted along on a cloud of agreement until Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, 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.

That moment in Dokan encapsulated the terrible paradox of the Iraq war and, for Makiya, a crushing turn in a long personal journey.

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