Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with ''Republic of Fear'' (1989), which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with ''Cruelty and Silence'' (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.

Makiya was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later working for his father's architectural firm, Makiya & Associates which had branch offices in London and across the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the Iraq War (2003–2011) effort. He subsequently admitted that effort "went wrong". Provided by Wikipedia