Makiya

I wonder from time to time what's become of Kenan Makiya, the liberal Iraqi exile intellectual who sold a lot of people on the notion that invading Iraq was a moral obligation. Via Justin Logan here's Edward Wong's profile for The New York Times Magazine. Regarding people who say Hillary Clinton should apologize for backing the war, Makiya says “People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?" He also seems to have cooked up an idiosyncratic brand of incompetence dodge:

“There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences. . . .

Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. “The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.”

He thinks we should have, what? Invaded, sent our tanks into Baghdad, pulled down the statue, and then just left the country in a state of total chaos and somehow democracy was going to emerge from that? I agree that the occupation was a mistake, but that's just to say that the invasion itself was a mistake. The one follows from the other.