Kanan Makiya (born 1949) 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.