18 Facts About Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya was born on 1949 and is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University.

Kanan Makiya gained international attention with Republic of Fear, a best-selling book, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence, a critique of the Arab intelligentsia.

In 2003, Makiya lobbied the US government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.

Kanan Makiya began his political career as a Trotskyist and became closely identified with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Schwartz.

In 1967, Kanan Makiya left Iraq for the United States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was unable to return to Iraq until the 2000s due to the subsequent rise of the Ba'athist regime there.

In 1981, Kanan Makiya left the practice of architecture to become an academic and author.

Kanan Makiya wrote under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family.

Kanan Makiya's next book, The Monument, is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch.

In 2001 Kanan Makiya published The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale about Jerusalem, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of Muslim-Jewish relations in the formative first century of Islam, culminating in the building of the Dome of the Rock.

Kanan Makiya writes occasional columns and they have been published in The Independent and The New York Times.

Kanan Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal.

In 1992 Kanan Makiya founded the Iraq Research and Documentation Project, which was renamed the Iraq Memory Foundation in 2003.

Kanan Makiya worked closely with Ayad Rahim in the early development of the IRDP.

Kanan Makiya is widely known to have been a strong proponent of the 2003 Iraq War and advocated for the "complete dismantling of the security services of the regime, leaving only the regular police force intact".

Not for oil, Kanan Makiya argued, and not for some superweapons hidden in the sand, but to satisfy an obligation to our fellow human beings.

Years of war and murder had left Iraqis so thoroughly degraded, Kanan Makiya argued, that, once freed, they would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and, in their despair, look to the West.

Kanan Makiya had criticised Said for encouraging a sense of Muslim victimhood and offering inadequate censure to those in the Middle East who were themselves guilty of atrocities.

Kanan Makiya championed Chalabi to the exclusion of a wider opposition network, resulting in the marginalizing of experienced figures like Feisal al-Istrabadi who supported a wider net.