Rats and sinking ships
This important piece by Tim Phelps of Newsday highlights the disillusionment that three key, previous ultra-hawks-- Kanan Makiya, Rend Rahim (Francke), and Danielle Pletka-- are now expressing about the situation inside Iraq, including the contents of the draft constitution. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for noting Tim's story.)
Kanan and Rend are both Iraqi-Americans... Kanan was probably the leading "liberal" intellectual validator of the whole project of the US invading Iraq (but now admits he earlier misunderstood some key aspects of the Baath Party control system there.... Thanks for telling us, Kanan.)
Rend was the woman who famously, in the run-up to the war, said she hoped to ride atop the first US tank to enter Baghdad. She didn't do that but was for a while Allawi's pick to be Iraqi Ambassador to the US.
Pletka is a different kind of political personality. An intensely pro-Likud Jewish-American, she worked a while as Sen. Jesse Helms's chief foreign-affairs aide and is now Vice-President at key neo-con power-house the American Enterprise Institute. She has outraged people throughout the Arab world by, e.g., insisting on walking through very socially conservative downtown Gaza in a mini-skirt, or going to various capital cities and lecturing heads of government on how they should run their countries. (Oh, and did I mention she was a key advocate of the war?)
I don't consider any of these three to be, literally, "rats"; and I have some lingering admiration for Kanan, whom I've met a couple of times, though I always thought he was more than a little naive.
But if these three individuals are now openly quitting the "ship" of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, then I have to say the ship is headed rapidly for the depths.
(This whole phenomenon seems eerily similar to, and parallel with, the ire that social conservatives are launching against Bush re the Harriet Miers nomination... Interesting, huh?)
"Usually identified as having a research connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University (both in Boston), Makiya when I knew him first in the early 1970s was closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture student at MIT, but he hardly said anything during the occasions I saw him. Then he disappeared from view, or rather from my view. He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil, the author of a vaunted book called The Republic of Fear that described Saddam Hussein's rule with considerable dread and drama. One of the media-rousing works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear seemed to have been written -- according to a fawning interview with Makiya that appeared in the New Yorker magazine -- while Makiya took time off from working as an associate of his father's architectural firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a sense, Saddam had financed the writing of his book indirectly, although no one accused Makiya of collaborating with a regime he obviously detested."
Edward Said
Misinformation about Iraq