Leading Iraqi Dissident to Speak at Vanderbilt
Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile and adviser for the pro-democracy Iraqi National Congress, is scheduled to speak at Vanderbilt University on April 2. Born in Baghdad, Makiya directs the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University, which is attempting to make available for scholarly research three million pages of official Iraqi government documents captured by the Kurds following the Gulf War in 1991. Makiya is the founding director of the Washington-based nonprofit organization The Iraq Foundation, an organization that promotes public activities concerning democracy in Iraq. His paper, A Model for Post-Saddam Iraq, is influencing U.S. policy regarding the rebuilding of Iraq after the current war ends.

Makiya has been writing a series of commentaries on the Iraq war for the website of The New Republic. As the bombs started falling on Baghdad, Makiya wrote that the sound of those bombs was the sound of freedom. You can find all of Makiya's essays by going to the homepage of The New Republic and looking for the "War Diary" button. His essays are routinely quoted in the blogosphere.

Some more infor about Makiya, courtesy of Vanderbilt's press release: Makiya's book Republic of Fear, written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, became a bestseller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. His book Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World, published under his own name, was awarded The Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations published in English in 1993. Makiya also has collaborated on two films for television including Saddam's Killing Fields, which first exposed the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. That film received the Edward R. Morrow Award For Best Television Documentary on Foreign Affairs in 1992.

The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile of Makiya and his work as part of the Future of Iraq Project, a project of the U.S. State Department that is planning Iraq's post-war transition to democracy. Makiya guided the writing of a Democratic Principles Working Group report for the Future of Iraq project. Here's a snippet of that NYT magazine profile:

There's something in it to offend everyone. The report proposes, among other radical ideas, a representative ''transitional authority'' chosen by Iraq's opposition exiles and ready to operate inside the country as the regime crumbles; the postwar demilitarization of Iraq; the dismantling of the Baath Party along the lines of German de-Nazification; war crimes trials and a truth commission; thoroughgoing secularism; a constitution in which individual and minority-group rights would be guaranteed in advance of local and then national elections, so that democracy does not lead to tyranny of the majority; a decentralized federal government in which the regions would be drawn along geographic rather than ethnic lines; and an end to ethnic identity as a basis for the state. As long as Iraq is defined as an Arab state, other ethnic groups, like Kurds and Assyrians, will continue to be second-class citizens. In Kanan Makiya's blueprint, Iraq would officially cease to be an Arab country.

Makiya will likely be prominent in the reconstruction and political reformation of liberated Iraq. If you can't attend his appearance at Vanderbilt, at least read his War Diary essays.