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