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The End of Saddam and the Future of Iraq

Kanan Makiya '71, MAR '74: January 8, 2004; Running Time: 1:40:23

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Saddam Hussein left a very visible legacy from 30 bloody years in power: countless victims and a broken nation. But there is also a more obscure inheritance, literally mountains of documents left by the Ba’ath Party and security groups. Kanan Makiya’s mission is to retrieve and index these materials, and make public the comprehensive corruption of the old regime. These are not just precise and voluminous records of an oppressive state, says Makiya. These are stories of ordinary Iraqis. Everyday survival meant spying on or betraying family and friends. Even graduating from high school depended on proving loyalty to the state. So it is not a simple matter of determining who did what to whom. “All Iraqis participated and were complicit in the regime. That is what the archives show,” Makiya says. He believes that nation-building will be possible only after all Iraqis admit their responsibility for the country’s disrepair. He is seeking a “form of cathartic social release that will have political consequences.” But Makiya acknowledges enormous challenges to achieving this goal, as the U.S. prepares to withdraw from a lawless, fragmented Iraq -- having set in motion the large tasks of holding elections and drafting a constitution.

Lecture Details

Location: Killian Hall

About the Speaker

Kanan Makiya '71, MAR '74

The Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Brandeis University Founder, Iraq Memory Foundation

Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad but left Iraq to study architecture at MIT. In 1981, Makiya left his architecture practice and began to write a book about Iraq, Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. His next book, The Monument (1991), was an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch. Both Republic of Fear and The Monument were written under the pseudonym, Samir al-Khalil. The award-winning Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993), followed, and most recently he published The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem (2002). Along with these books, Makiya has written for The Independent, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The Times. Makiya has played a central role in Harvard's Iraq Research and Documentation Project, which has collected resources on and created a database about the rule of Iraq's Ba'ath Party. He is one of the influential Iraqi exiles who advocated the removal of Saddam's regime. He is currently an adviser to Iraq's Interim Governing Council and a member of the panel working on the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution.