Kanan Makiya Biography

Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-British academic and a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention for calling attention to the human rights abuses in Saddam's Iraq in Cruelty and Silence, and accusing Arab intellectuals and Western Leftists of turning a blind eye to these abuses under the pretense of anti-imperialism. Makiya would later lobby the US government to invade Iraq in 2003 to oust Hussein.