Cruelty and Silence
Kanan Makiya
Jonathan Cape
On August 2, 1990, when I heard that Saddam Husain had just invaded Kuwait, I felt sick. The instinctive thought was that he was going to get away with it. The Arab world was in a moribund, fragmented state and Saddam Husain knew his world, however little he may have understood anyone else’s. Had he been allowed to get away with the annexation of the whole or part of Kuwait, everything that he stood for in politics would have been projected outward, shaping the Arab world for generations to come. For each one of us, the most important moments in politics begin with the kind of raw feeling that overcame me as I sat in my living room listening to the news. All the complex analyses and fancy formulations—which are a writer’s trade—fall into line behind such feelings. Writing and thinking turn into mere elaboration of elemental instinct.
“Saddam Husain has to be stopped,” I wrote that same August. “The major flaw in the American-led effort against him is that the shock troops in the front lines are not Arabs. The old nationalist, anti-imperialist formulas are therefore already being ... | 
