Interview with Kanan Makiya, author of the Republic of Fear

Kanan Makiya is a key Iraqi democracy and human rights advocate. The Middle East Forum website carries a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with him. Amongst other things he says that Crucial to the policy of de-Baathification is society. And he also says that The central error was the coalition's tendency to focus on the 52 "Deck of Cards" suspects, who were at the absolute top of the Iraqi state pyramid. As a result, tens of thousands of trained thugs, intelligence reaching out to those many hundreds of thousands of people who were fellow travelers of the Baath party—not out of ideological conviction, but out of necessity. They had no alternative, and that was the only way to function in officers, and senior army personnel did not believe that they would be held accountable for what they had done under Saddam's regime. Those people should have been arrested, questioned and, at the very minimum, closely watched. That didn't happen though, and these same people are now the leaders of the insurgency.