Moral Cowardice. Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Kanan Makiya on XM's public radio. I have never seen a liar as good as he is. He is a better liar than Bill Clinton, I admit. When the host played him a tape of an interview he had given back in 2002, in which he predicted that US troops would be thinned out in 3 years, he denied having said what listeners just heard him say. He now has a way of explaining his position: he basically says that the Iraqi people are so "traumatized" and so mentally and intellectually incompetent that they don't realize that they should do what Makiya wants them to do. He now regularly insists that US is not to blame for what transpired in Iraq, but that Iraqis should be blamed although yesterday he criticized the CIA US Department of State for betraying the vision of the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon. When I reviewed his book Cruelty and Silence in the Middle East Journal I said that the man suffers from an acute case of conceit. It only got worse with time. At another point when he was confronted with the lousy predictions that he had made about Iraq, he could only say: the "beauty" of politics and war is that you can't predict what will happen. The host had to remind him that the word "beauty" does not apply here given the large number of dead Iraqis and Americans and others.