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.
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.
The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam's Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club's Edward Murrow Award in 1992.
The Iraq Memory Foundation went on to receive $5.1 million in contracts from the Pentagon from 2004 to 2006 in order to publicize Saddam Hussein's atrocities as part of the U.S. war effort.
[10] Makiya is widely known to have been a strong proponent of the 2003 Iraq War and advocated for the "complete dismantling of the security services of the regime, leaving only the regular police force intact".
[13] Makiya is quoted as having said, "As I told the President on January 10th, I think [the troops] will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months and simply have very, very little doubts that that is the case."
Years of war and murder had left Iraqis so thoroughly degraded, Makiya argued, that, once freed, they would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and, in their despair, look to the West.However, the article depicted Makiya expressing concern over the subsequent war, and comparing the number of Iraqi deaths since 2003 to deaths under the deposed ruler Saddam Hussein: "It's getting closer to Saddam.
"[4] In the original 1986 draft of Republic of Fear, Makiya had referred to "the growth of confessionalism, family loyalties, ethnic hatred, and religious sectarianism in Iraqi society—which Ba'thism simultaneously inculcated and kept at bay" and predicted that in the event of a Ba'athist collapse in the Iran–Iraq War there was a "hidden potential for even more violence inside Iraq [which] could at some point in the future make the Lebanese civil war look like a family outing gone slightly sour.
Makiya had criticised Said for encouraging a sense of Muslim victimhood and offering inadequate censure to those in the Middle East who were themselves guilty of atrocities.
Concluded journalist Christopher Lydon in 2007: "My friend Kanan Makiya was the most influential Iraqi advocate in America of the war to "liberate" his country five years ago.