Kanan Makiya is Senior Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. His books include Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (1989) and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (1993). In 2003, he founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, a NGO based in Baghdad and the US that is dedicated to issues of remembrance, violence, and identity formation.