Kanan Makiya and Edward Said’s own 'Misinformation About Iraq'

Edward Said, a Columbia University professor of comparative literature more well-known for his Palestinian activism, recently published the aptly-titled column "Misinformation About Iraq". The column lived up to half of its name. Indeed, it was filled with misinformation. However, it was only tangentially concerned with Iraq. The vast majority of it was devoted to ad hominem attacks against Professor Kanan Makiya, one of the world’s leading Iraqi intellectuals and activists.

He begins by providing background information on Mr. Makiya, a man who has always been open about his past. I did not read anything about Mr. Makiya by Said that I did not already know. He then offers the following indictment of Mr. Makiya:

"He was hailed here and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or that whatever meagre writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West."

This is a puzzling statement to say the least. Mr. Makiya was not able to write "in an Arab country" because his homeland, Iraq, is ruled by a gang of murderers called the Ba’ath party who would gladly murder Mr. Makiya and eliminate his eloquent voice for freedom if they possibly could. Said can write from most Arab countries because he does not have a bad word to say about the Arab dictatorships that have enslaved the Arab people and killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs. I would not go so far as to say that Mr. Makiya has chosen to live a "risk-free life in the West". I fail to see how being the world’s most vocal opponent of a genocidal dictator is living a risk-free life! Mr. Makiya is a brilliant man, and could make a fine living for himself without bothering to worry about the liberation of his homeland. For Said to make such a statement is laughable. This coming from an Ivy League professor who claims to support his nation from afar with verbosity and little else and whose last "revolutionary" action against his supposed oppressor was to toss a pebble over the Lebanese border!

He further writes:

"Then last year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but was nevertheless aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction."

I will ignore Said’s childish criticism of Mr. Makiya’s writing style and only state that it does not seem unusual for a work of historical fiction to cite various sources. I read this novel and found it to be interesting and insightful, and I was impressed by Mr. Makiya’s use of sources from a variety of different background and his ability to weave these diverse narratives into one story.

Said continues:

"Until the government-inspired campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago Makiya had said little about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan."

Not true. Mr. Makiya was a keynote speaker at New School University in New York City on the Arab world after September 11. I know this because I was there and I spoke with him after the event. Either I imagined the event or Said is making baseless claims without doing proper research.

On the federalism, Said writes:

"Undeterred by such unimportant considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather than to a centralised government. The proof that he offers is pretty negligible… One would have thought that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success."

Said conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that Iraq is a multi-ethnic state and, due to its multi-ethnic nature, the federal solution is the only scheme that will treat Iraq’s various ethnicities fairly. Iraqis should be able to decide their fate. Said should have no say in the future of Iraq’s Kurds or any other of its people, and I am quite confident that he will not.

He further writes:

"The grand climax of Makiya’s justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about both the future and the past.)"

How can Iraq be an Arab state when such a substantial portion of its population is non-Arab? Iraq’s Kurds have been victimized for decades in the name of pan-Arabism and, nonetheless, both of Iraq’s major Kurdish parties (the KDP and PUK) have committed themselves to a unified and democratic Iraq. Is Said suggesting that the Kurds of Iraq should risk what they have achieved since 1991 to establish a pan-Arab Iraq in which they will again be second-class citizens? This suggestion would be truly laughable if Said and his numerous fans did not take it seriously!

Said proclaims:

"In and of himself, Makiya is a passing phenomenon."

I would wager that Said and his bankrupt, pan-Arabist line are a passing phenomenon. Mr. Makiya has a vision for a free Iraq. Said has no vision whatsoever. If he did, then perhaps he would not use his time to write long-winded personal attacks against those who have hurt his feelings in the past. Hussain Hindawi ("Analysis: Iraqi opposition still divided", UPI) wrote the following on December 20, 2002 concerning the recent Iraqi opposition conference in London:

"Significantly, last week Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab newspapers urged their respective governments to open a dialogue with the Iraqi opposition."

It seems that even the so-called "Arab street" is finally convinced that the Ba’athi regime is a passing phenomenon. Soon Saddam and all of his friends and supporters will be transformed from sad realities into bad memories. What will remain for all is the knowledge that certain so-called intellectuals supported the tyrannical regime as it butchered the Iraqi people.

He ends his article by stating:

"With no stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks (like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush administration like flies on a cake. British imperialism, Israel’s brutal occupation policies, or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment. Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!"

Obviously Said did not read all of Cruelty and Silence. It seems that he grabbed the book and did just what any high school student might do with a brand new yearbook. He checked the index and read everything it said about him, and little else. If he had read the entire work, he would have noticed that Mr. Makiya wrote of the stench of occupation, and referred to both the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the Kuwaiti occupation of Iraq.

Woe to Iraq when countless parties claim to speak in support of the Iraqi people while taking actions perpetuating the repressive Ba’athi regime. May all the people of Iraq, Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, and Assyrian, be blessed with freedom. Woe to Iraq!

		Druckversion
	KurdishMedia.com \| 25 December 2002 \| by Jeff Klein Kanan Makiya and Edward Said’s own 'Misinformation About Iraq' Edward Said, a Columbia University professor of comparative literature more well-known for his Palestinian activism, recently published the aptly-titled column "Misinformation About Iraq". The column lived up to half of its name. Indeed, it was filled with misinformation. However, it was only tangentially concerned with Iraq. The vast majority of it was devoted to ad hominem attacks against Professor Kanan Makiya, one of the world’s leading Iraqi intellectuals and activists. He begins by providing background information on Mr. Makiya, a man who has always been open about his past. I did not read anything about Mr. Makiya by Said that I did not already know. He then offers the following indictment of Mr. Makiya: "He was hailed here and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or that whatever meagre writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West." This is a puzzling statement to say the least. Mr. Makiya was not able to write "in an Arab country" because his homeland, Iraq, is ruled by a gang of murderers called the Ba’ath party who would gladly murder Mr. Makiya and eliminate his eloquent voice for freedom if they possibly could. Said can write from most Arab countries because he does not have a bad word to say about the Arab dictatorships that have enslaved the Arab people and killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs. I would not go so far as to say that Mr. Makiya has chosen to live a "risk-free life in the West". I fail to see how being the world’s most vocal opponent of a genocidal dictator is living a risk-free life! Mr. Makiya is a brilliant man, and could make a fine living for himself without bothering to worry about the liberation of his homeland. For Said to make such a statement is laughable. This coming from an Ivy League professor who claims to support his nation from afar with verbosity and little else and whose last "revolutionary" action against his supposed oppressor was to toss a pebble over the Lebanese border! He further writes: "Then last year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but was nevertheless aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction." I will ignore Said’s childish criticism of Mr. Makiya’s writing style and only state that it does not seem unusual for a work of historical fiction to cite various sources. I read this novel and found it to be interesting and insightful, and I was impressed by Mr. Makiya’s use of sources from a variety of different background and his ability to weave these diverse narratives into one story. Said continues: "Until the government-inspired campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago Makiya had said little about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan." Not true. Mr. Makiya was a keynote speaker at New School University in New York City on the Arab world after September 11. I know this because I was there and I spoke with him after the event. Either I imagined the event or Said is making baseless claims without doing proper research. On the federalism, Said writes: "Undeterred by such unimportant considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather than to a centralised government. The proof that he offers is pretty negligible… One would have thought that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success." Said conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that Iraq is a multi-ethnic state and, due to its multi-ethnic nature, the federal solution is the only scheme that will treat Iraq’s various ethnicities fairly. Iraqis should be able to decide their fate. Said should have no say in the future of Iraq’s Kurds or any other of its people, and I am quite confident that he will not. He further writes: "The grand climax of Makiya’s justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about both the future and the past.)" How can Iraq be an Arab state when such a substantial portion of its population is non-Arab? Iraq’s Kurds have been victimized for decades in the name of pan-Arabism and, nonetheless, both of Iraq’s major Kurdish parties (the KDP and PUK) have committed themselves to a unified and democratic Iraq. Is Said suggesting that the Kurds of Iraq should risk what they have achieved since 1991 to establish a pan-Arab Iraq in which they will again be second-class citizens? This suggestion would be truly laughable if Said and his numerous fans did not take it seriously! Said proclaims: "In and of himself, Makiya is a passing phenomenon." I would wager that Said and his bankrupt, pan-Arabist line are a passing phenomenon. Mr. Makiya has a vision for a free Iraq. Said has no vision whatsoever. If he did, then perhaps he would not use his time to write long-winded personal attacks against those who have hurt his feelings in the past. Hussain Hindawi ("Analysis: Iraqi opposition still divided", UPI) wrote the following on December 20, 2002 concerning the recent Iraqi opposition conference in London: "Significantly, last week Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab newspapers urged their respective governments to open a dialogue with the Iraqi opposition." It seems that even the so-called "Arab street" is finally convinced that the Ba’athi regime is a passing phenomenon. Soon Saddam and all of his friends and supporters will be transformed from sad realities into bad memories. What will remain for all is the knowledge that certain so-called intellectuals supported the tyrannical regime as it butchered the Iraqi people. He ends his article by stating: "With no stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks (like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush administration like flies on a cake. British imperialism, Israel’s brutal occupation policies, or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment. Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!" Obviously Said did not read all of Cruelty and Silence. It seems that he grabbed the book and did just what any high school student might do with a brand new yearbook. He checked the index and read everything it said about him, and little else. If he had read the entire work, he would have noticed that Mr. Makiya wrote of the stench of occupation, and referred to both the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the Kuwaiti occupation of Iraq. Woe to Iraq when countless parties claim to speak in support of the Iraqi people while taking actions perpetuating the repressive Ba’athi regime. May all the people of Iraq, Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, and Assyrian, be blessed with freedom. Woe to Iraq! WADI e.V. \| tel.: (+49) 069-57002440 \| fax (+49) 069-57002444 http://www.wadinet.de \| e-mail: