This is a (slightly adapted) version of a lecture Kanan Makiya gave last week at the University of New Hampshire. Makiya contrasts the relative progress made by Iraq’s victims-become-citizens with the dithering (and worse) of the country’s political class. His unillusioned, yet undespairing analysis clarifies the situation on the ground. It also hints why Makiya himself may one day be remembered – against all odds – as the intellectual father of the democracy struggling to be born in Iraq. The following passage gets right to the heart of the matter:
Both of Iraq’s national elections in 2005 and 2010 were in the end about that most fundamental of all political questions: “Who am I?” And how could it be otherwise in the new post-Saddam world that had so suddenly thrust itself upon the people of Iraq. Having been subjected to the gravest of depredations, and scarred by a brutal dictatorship unmatched in its capacity for cruelty, the Iraqi people entered political life in 2003, thanks to the United States and its allies, as an unknown quantity, unknown even to themselves…To be sure the men and women who took their lives in their hands as they went out to vote in 2005, when quite literally they were being targeted by al-Qaeda as they lined up at polling places, were heroes. They were heroes in a way that it is difficult for outsiders who have not been subjected to such sustained decades-long abuse and intimidation to understand. But they were also victims, and they carried the scars of that victim-hood in their hearts and minds; victim-hood is not something that can be erased overnight. And, in spite of what so much of Arab political culture has been trying to persuade us of in recent years – and not only Arab culture – it has to be emphasized there is no virtue in victim-hood; it is a terrible affliction, not a moral quality. It degrades us as citizens and as human beings. And so the question arises: How did these victims-become-citizens handle themselves in the two elections under consideration?