Freedom is a heady thing. To an Iraqi, it is like being awakened from a 30-year nightmare by a blinding blaze of bright white light. When a young man… - Kanan Makiya

Generations of Arabs have paid with their lives and their futures because of a set of illusions that had nothing to do with Israel; these illusions come from deep within the world that we Arabs have constructed for ourselves, a world built upon denial, bombast and imagined past glories, ideas that have since been exposed as bankrupt and dangerous to the future of young Arab men and women who set out in 2011, against all odds, to build a new order.

I ran into a whole number of people for whom bodies did not count. You know: the historical process, the victory for the working class. The great big idea that could take place at the expense of any number of bodies because ultimately, in the very, very long run, lives would be saved. I would not make that argument anymore. It is utterly repugnant to me.

Mr. Hussein used sectarianism and nationalism as tools against his internal enemies when he was weak. Today's Iraqi Shiite parties are doing worse: they are legitimizing their rule on a sectarian basis. The idea of Iraq as a multiethnic country is being abandoned, and the same dynamic is at work in Syria.