Editor's note: This weekend marks the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, with peace protests planned nationwide and abroad. This is an interview with Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-born MIT-trained architect, who wrote "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq" (1989) and was active in the Iraqi National Congress. Makiya is a professor at Brandeis University and encouraged the Bush administration to oust Saddam Hussein. He was interviewed by Rajiv Chandrasekaran for The Washington Post.

Q. Is Iraq in the midst of a civil war?

A. We're teetering on the edge of one, and I think as always, politics is going to be the deciding factor. By politics, I mean leadership politics, which has been sorely lacking in Iraq.

Q. Before the war, many Iraqi exiles predicted that the Iraqi people would unite behind moderate leaders. Where are those leaders, and why haven't we seen more moderation?

A. The failure lies in the inability of Iraqi leaders to rise above their own groups and confessional allegiances. We have not had a visionary, a leader able to think beyond the self-interest of their group. So we have a politics of selfishness ... (and) a politics of victimhood, an elevation of victimhood into a quality as though it were something in and of itself. In particular, this applies to the Shiite leadership.

Q. Why hasn't a more unifying leader risen from the Shiite community? Where is Iraq's Nelson Mandela or Hamid Karzai?

A. We're talking about a completely new elite that has had no experience of government before. They have created a Shiite political organization, identifying Shiiteness over Iraqiness. This, I feel, is the source of their failure. Their interpretation of democracy ... is of democracy being majority rule, as opposed to minority rights.

When you remove the suffocating lid of dictatorship, a dictatorship that has oppressed on the basis of ethnic identity, then it is very natural that those who have been so repressed react by being assertive — the very thing that has been denied from the days of (Saddam) Hussein. And that is what we are watching today.

Q. Could the Americans have done anything differently from the outset to reduce the chances of sectarian politics and civil strife we're now seeing today? Before the war, you advocated the formation of a provisional government led by Iraqis in exile. Do you still believe that was the right way to go?

A. There's this old thorn ... and that is the issue of provisional government versus occupation. Occupation was the wrong formula for dealing with the transition. The U.S. government pushed aside the Iraqi opposition — both those groups that were in exile and those groups that were inside Iraq, mainly the Kurds. The unwillingness, for instance, to involve the Kurds in deliberations on Iraq as a whole because of how that may look in the rest of the Arab world was a big mistake, I think. The unwillingness to have the Iraqis keep their army. That was another mistake. But that goes hand-in- glove with the idea of occupation as opposed to a provisional government, like what was done in Afghanistan. So what we ended up with was the rhetoric of liberation but the reality of occupation.

Isn't it interesting that 80 (percent) to 90 percent of those very same characters who were waltzing in and out of Washington before the war today have been "legitimized" through elections? Look at the political elite, look at the names, they're all there — the very same people. But what we have lost in the meantime is three years, a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of bad relations and so on.

Iraqis today care about electricity, they care about looting, they care about a sense of authority. These people have lived under extreme authority for 35 years. You just don't take the lid off and overnight have a democratic experiment. The lid of authority has to be changed and replaced. There is a benign kind of dictatorial authority, a transition between one and the other, which in this case could have been through a provisional government that was profoundly influenced by the United States. Now, after the fact, all of this is too late, but we might've had a different dynamic.

Q. Before the war, you spoke to a number of senior officials in the U.S. government, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Do you feel that they understood the depth of the issues, the animus between Sunnis and Shiites, between Arabs and Kurds? Did they understand the complexity of Iraq?

A. I honestly don't think that's the source of the problem. This animus is a creation. Look, let me give you a little example. It's almost a childish example. The other day, a good friend of mine interviewed a lady from the neighborhood to work as a cleaning person in his house, and the first thing this lady did was say to the woman of the house, "Are you Sunnis or Shiites?" And it so happened that the family that was trying to hire this person was Sunni, and the working woman was a Shiite. And she walked out of the house. She said, "Thank you very much," and she left. She told the guard at the end of the house, "I can't work in a Sunni house."

You may think that we're now talking about decades-old prejudices and hatred between Sunnis and Shiites; I say no. I say this is a manufactured consciousness ... There were all kinds of latent divisions. There were all kinds of ways in which people discriminated against all kinds of other people. But that kind of a conversation has emerged as an issue because of the way Iraqi politics has developed in the last two years.

Q. Do you regret telling the president that the Iraqi people would "greet the troops with sweets and flowers?"

A. I regret the phrase but not the intent behind the phrase. By and large, the Iraqi people received the United States very well in the first two or three months — before the occupation was enshrined.

Q. Bush-administration officials have indicated a desire to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Iraq this year. Do you support a reduction in troops?

A. I wish they wouldn't draw down their troops so quickly.

Q. You have written extensively about the abuses of Saddam Hussein. Saddam certainly seems to be making a mockery of the proceedings.

A. He is. Well, of course, he's doing what in some senses was expected of him: to deny the legitimacy of the whole process.

There's something in the design of the court, in the rules of the court that ... were badly designed. One other thing that I think is wrong is that the case against Saddam Hussein and his henchmen has not yet been properly put. We're dealing with a case where 150 people were executed. I understand the overall strategy is to move from one case to the next case to the next case, but the result is that the Iraqi people, and the Arab world, have not yet been faced with the magnitude of his crimes as a whole. That picture has not yet been painted by the prosecution. We're talking about an act of revenge in which the president ordered the killing of 150 people. That could apply to a hundred other presidents in some way or another.

We have not yet looked at the magnitude of the crimes of this regime — the reason why the United States went in there, and the reason why this regime was beheaded. But the reasons why this regime somehow stood out in an international community that has many unpleasant regimes in it hasn't yet been presented by anybody. And that is the central failure of this court.

Q. Was it a mistake not to allow foreign judges and foreign prosecutors at the tribunal?

A. Yeah, I always thought that was a mistake. I wanted Iraqis involved, but I wanted a meeting of the two. I knew right up front that the judicial system, the judges, were simply not up to the task.

Q. How do you feel when your countrymen in Baghdad now have to endure hours-long blackouts, and miles-long queues for petrol, water shortages, insurgent attacks and pervasive crime? Among both Sunnis and Shiites, some of them say they yearn for the days when Saddam was in power. How does hearing that make you feel?

A. I feel terrible, and I understand why they say that. And I blame Iraqi politicians for it.

But on the issue of electricity and blackouts, there's a part of me, there's some little part of my brain that simply doesn't understand how the most powerful country on Earth just can't simply get electricity back on in Baghdad. ... I've heard all the explanations. I've seen the reports. I know the technical stuff, but I find it mind-blowing that that was not solved.

Q. It's been almost three years since the liberation of Iraq. Are you disappointed with how things have turned out thus far?

A. Yes, no doubt in my mind. I'm sad. I'm very sad.