Kanan Makiya: What Went Wrong in 2003: An Iraqi Story for the Future

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Kanan Makiya, born in Baghdad, is the author of the best-selling Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, the book that put Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist regime in the crosshairs. His new book, The Rope, which was available for signing, is an unflinching novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American invasion. In 2003, Makiya founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, an NGO based in Baghdad and the U.S. dedicated to documenting and overcoming the legacy of evil from Saddam’s regime. He has collaborated on several films, including “Saddam’s Killing Fields,” which exposed for the first time the campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The Memory Foundation has collected and digitized nearly 10 million pages of Ba’th-era documents. He is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. Makiya has also written The Monument (1991), Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993), and The Rock: A Seventh-Century Tale of Jerusalem (2010).