Bleh

Via Laura Rozen, here's an interview worth reading with Kanan Makiya.

If you don't know who Makiya is—and you probably don't, unless you're a huge freak—he was the Bush administration's favorite Iraqi before the war. He wrote several books about the berserk cruelty of Saddam's regime, loudly supported a U.S. invasion, and famously told Dick Cheney we were going to be greeted "as liberators."

Supposedly Makiya has been chastened by events since, but you'd never know it to read this:

Kanan Makiya: Europe gave strength to the argument that it was a traditional colonist land grab or oil grab, which was nonsense, of course...

They undermined entirely the values of the operation. Europeans knew that the United States was not going to permanently occupy Iraq. Deep down the smarter Europeans must have known it wasn't just about oil. It was—rightly or wrongly—a way of changing the traditional western attitude towards the Arab Muslim world. It was an end to the support for autocratic and repressive governments. It was a new view that if we are going to succeed in this war against terror then we are going to have to be viewed by the populations of this part of the world in a totally different way.

Those damn Europeans, refusing to admit that rain has now begun to fall up. This only gives aid and comfort to the enemy!