Uncle Tom

LENIN'S TOMB: Dear Professor Makiya...

An Iraqi exile has some words for this Uncle Tom. Makiya, of course, recently told the New York Times - amid a dire bleat about how disappointed he is in Iraqis for their failure to live up to the high standards set by the occupation - that to expect one to apologise for having supported this mass slaughter was "Maoist". About Makiya, you must know that he is routinely lionised as, for instance, "an Arab dissident in the manner of Havel or Solzhenitsyn". I take that from George Packer's The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, but I'm pretty sure Nick Cohen said something similar recently.

Packer's book is a prolonged love letter to Makiya and the pro-war Left, whose seductive arguments he claims to have been taken in by. I want to lay some of this on you, as it's a real laugh. Here's Packer upon meeting Makiya in his office, who has declared himself "a universalist" and claimed that he has formed something called Charter 91 (thus practically begging for the comparison with Havel)...