Kanan Makiya has been trained to design things; buildings and towers. Now he wants to design a nation. In the 1960s, the self-proclaimed Trotskyite left Iraq to study architecture in the U.S. Today, a different kind of dissident, he’s helping the White House draft plans to turn Iraq into a democracy.
His supporters call him Iraq’s Solzhenitsyn for his work in exposing Saddam Hussein’s brutality, while critics say he’s crazy to trust the U.S. government’s good will. But Makiya says that the removal of Hussein would present an opportunity to reshape the Middle East unseen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. What’s more, he says, the Iraqi people are ready to hear the U.S. bombers’ roar.
Guests:
Kanan Makiya, professor of Middle East Studies at Brandeis and director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University.