by Kanan Makiya

About the author: Kanan Makiya is the author of Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, from which this viewpoint is excerpted. Makiya, a graduate of the London School of Economics, is also the author of Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil.

The Gulf Crisis [Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Persian Gulf War, and the 1991 Iraqi uprising against Saddam Husain] was never simply a matter of foreign manipulation or of the evil man playing the demagogue; it was at bottom an Arab moral failure of historic proportions, for which everyone who cares for the future of this part of the world must feel personally responsible. Something, somewhere along the line, has gone profoundly wrong in the Arab world; Saddam Husain...