Today, I had an exceptionally rewarding experience: a conversation with Kanan Makiya, here on Q&A. Makiya is the Arab intellectual, Iraqi intellectual, who wrote the book that told all of us about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Republic of Fear. His new book is a novel, also having to do with Saddam Hussein: The Rope (as in the instrument of that dictator’s death).

In this podcast, we talk about many things. Saddam, of course. The Iran-Iraq War. The Iraq War. Its aftermath. Iraq’s present. Its future?

We also talk about the greater Arab and Muslim world. Many Americans dearly want to wash their hands of it. Who can blame them? No one, certainly not Professor Makiya. (He teaches at Brandeis.) But can we really wash our hands?

One of our topics is the Arab Spring — which so many like to mock. “‘Arab Spring,’ ha ha ha! What a joke.” Makiya explains, in both informed and moving tones, why it is not to be mocked. And why its full impact is yet to be felt.

If you don’t know Professor Makiya, this podcast is a very good opportunity, and very good introduction, I would say. He is brilliant, wise, humane, worldly, and brave. Very, very brave. His books are bestsellers. But they also put him in the crosshairs of people who want to continue the old way of dictatorship and oppression. Or who want to sweep the Middle East’s problems under the rug.

That, Makiya would never do. Again, here.