the heartbreaking truth about Iraq

Kanan Makiya, a supporter of the overthrow of Saddam, spells out the nuances, in painful intellectually honest detail [emphasis mine], about Iraq that have been entirely lost in the shrill partisan hysteria over the war:

Makiya: I, like many others, made many mistakes of evaluation, of judgment [about the invasion of Iraq]. But I don’t know how to look anybody in the face today and say that because things have gone wrong since the liberation, that it was therefore wrong to get rid of an extraordinary tyranny like [the one] we suffered under in Iraq. An exceptional tyranny, even by the terrible standards of the Middle East. It seems to me these are two separate questions, morally speaking. Not politically; I’m not speaking realpolitik.

I’m sure today, not a day passes that many members of the American administration do not rue the day that they ever supported this activity of getting rid of the tyrant and replacing [him with] a new order. They certainly regret it, because it has not been in American interests, by and large.

But I, as an Iraqi, from the point of view of someone for whom that dictatorship and its abuses over 30 years have been the be-all and end-all of my life — I have seen what they have done — I cannot ever say that it was wrong to support the overthrow of that dictatorship. And I challenge any human being to say to me that that was wrong.

Read the whole thing. Makiya’s humanism and empathy, his agonizing over the moral issues, his concern with human rights and freedom for all people, are in stark contrast to the entertaining if creepy posturing*** and jockeying for position among the purveyors of opinion as they try to assess the shifting political terrain in Washington and where they will fit into it.

Meanwhile, on the political front: now that we’re all talking about how best to solve the problem of Iraq, hasn’t the wind gone out of the Democrats’ sails? A week ago, Iraq was a disaster for the Republicans, and the Democrats were hammering them very successfully on the issue. Now suddenly Iraq is everybody’s problem.

Someone was following the age-old advice that when you come to a problem you can’t solve [Iraq, which is your party's problem if you're Bush], make it bigger [i.e., draw everyone in---in this case, by leaking the Iraq Study Group recommendations early, you shift from blame mode to where-do-we-go-from here? mode].

John Dickerson’s take on this in Slate here:

Utilizing Baker as an insider with the appearance of independence also presents Bush with an opportunity to change course. The president doesn’t have to say he’s following the Study Group’s recommendations. He can claim the ideas were already under consideration—his approach when he yielded to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after members of both parties had been calling for such a thing, In this case, the leader of the thoughtful and sober Study Group would serve to sprinkle legitimacy on a redirection of policy that Bush will inevitably take credit for.

And true to form and smooooooth as ever, Baker goes to the heart of the matter and stresses the Group’s “independence” in his interview on NewsHour:

MARGARET WARNER: You write in your book that Defense Department, DOD, made what you called a number of costly mistakes, everything from disbanding the Iraqi army to not committing enough U.S. troops to the job. Now, Secretary Rumsfeld has never acknowledged these were mistakes; neither has the president. What gives you confidence that they are ready to embrace recommendations to chart some kind of new course?JAMES BAKER: We have no assurance whatsoever that they will embrace what we recommend. As I told someone last night, everybody knows how close I am to the Bush family. But if our report is going to be worth anything, it has to be independent and it has to be our telling it like it is. And I’m here to tell you that’s the way it’s going to be, as far as I’m concerned.

Now, we have no assurance that the administration or the Congress or the American people, for that matter, will embrace our report. But hopefully we will be able to come up with a bipartisan approach to this problem that will make some recommendations and suggestions that are useful.

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***Fareed Zakaria has made Oprah’s list of 16 “real sexiest men alive.” Really.

WASHINGTON, DC: Mumbai-born journalist Fareed Zakaria has been listed by O – The Oprah Magazine, as one of the 16 “real sexiest men alive”. Zakaria has been listed with such people as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; United Nations Millennium Project Director Jefferey D Sachs; Olympic gold medalist Johann Olav Koss; and Ground Zero Memorial architect Michael Arad.

The list will be published in the October issue of the bestselling magazine for women founded by television chat show superstar Oprah Winfrey, of which she is also the editorial director. Explaining the list, the magazine says: “The true turn-ons are brains, humour, compassion and commitment.”

Is that a cultural trend or what? Move over, Tom Cruise.

Fareed’s the hot one now.