[lbo-talk] Can Leftists in the Iranian Diaspora Come to Terms with Iran?

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Sat Oct 6 00:51:17 PDT 2007


On 10/5/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:Ahmed Chalabi is an Iraqi, and so is Kanan Makiya (who, according to


> Edward Said, was a Trotskyist in the 60s and 70s). No doubt in some
> ways they know about Iraq better than I do, but if they had loved
> their country more than their ideology, they might have made a
> different decision and employed their knowledge for a nobler cause.

Makiya was a member of the Fourth International in the 1970s, and was friends with the likes of Gilbert Achcar, Mike Davis, Tariq Ali etc. However, he moved to the right in light of his disappointment with the Lebanese civil war and the Iranian Revolution (which he didn't think was in any sense progressive). He then read up on the liberal classics - Locke and so on - became acquainted with Sklar's "putting cruelty first" liberalism, and eventually wrote 'The Republic of Fear' as a regurgitation of Koestler-style antitotalitarian literature, with references to Kafka and Solzhenitsyn. It's not accidental that the pro-war 'left' call him 'the Iraqi Solzhenitsyn'. He was plainly cultivating that role for himself (although he didn't become an outright American apologist until late 1990 when he assured General Schwarzkopf that Iraqis would welcome him with hugs if he only took his tanks into Baghdad).



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