Republic of Fear Quotes

“Gone was the slightest implication of compassion if it had ever existed before. “I have seen young boys burned alive,” he said. “I have seen Iranian and Iraqi boys tearing each other literally with their nails and teeth. It is raging hate against raging hate.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“In Iraq, the public has lost all sense of self; it exists only in the form artificially imparted to it by “its” regime. This was an outcome of statification, party growth, and all the other indices that have been discussed.442 The dissolution of Iraqi identity is the most fundamental explanation for why no connection existed in Baʿthist Iraq between military achievements and extending or withholding political allegiance.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“Masses of Iraqis keep on dying for no palpably tangible reason that they can so much as identify to themselves, far less anyone else. Why?”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The intimate connection between war and citizenship lies at the heart of the modern state,” Fouad ‘Ajami wrote of the 1967 defeat.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The absence of real pressures from within Iraqi society, from Iran, from the world at large, or even from his own party leaves those of us who would write about the “cause” of this war with nothing to evaluate “objectively” and argue about.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“History” has very little to say about this war other than to recall the greatest battle ever fought between Arabs and Persians on the plains of Qadisiyyah in southern Iraq (A.D. 636). This event produces intensely emotive imagery in Iraq where the war was officially called Qadisiyyat Saddam. The irony is, however, that the battle of Qadisiyya only succeeded in overthrowing the Sassanian empire because of how rotted through it had become, and historians are agreed that the Arabs won because Iranians abandoned their army in droves to join the Islamic advance. Moreover, Iraq was inside the Sassanian empire at the time (the ruins of its capital, Ctesiphon, are in the geographical center of modern Iraq). So this kind of history is made up of a heap of ironies and is not the “cause” of anything; it merely confirms, albeit negatively, how “modern” Iraqis and Iranians have become.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“Therefore, the legacy of pan-Arabism as a phase in postwar Arab politics lies not in its failure over half a century to achieve Arab unity but in the way it captured the high ground of all politics: the language and fundamental categories it is conducted in.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq