Fawaz Turki on the fisticuffs at the recent PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature:

And, yes, participants exchanged political ideas as well—or hurled them at each other. There was that heated debate between Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley who had filed repeatedly from Baghdad and authored the book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. and the Iraq-born commentator, Kanan Makiya. Danner opposed the invasion of Iraq, but Makiya supported it, claiming improbably “this is a country that now has a hope it never had before.”

The Iraqi, however, was outmatched intellectually by Danner, who had all the pertinent facts and figures at his fingertips, facts and figures that he proceeded to throw at Makiya like a boxer in the ring—a right to the midsection followed by an upper cut here and a left hook there. There was nothing that our pro-war Iraqi activist could do, as the blows rained down on him, than cover up. It was a classic case of an overmatched fighter trapped in the corner of the ring waiting for it to be over.

This is, of course, not the first time the two have taken opposite sides. Michael Massing reflected on the November 2002 forum on Iraq at NYU a few weeks afterward (this has a sort of Sondheim quality, doesn't it?):

The son of a prominent Iraqi architect who came to this country in the late 1960s to attend MIT and never left, Makiya has spent the past fifteen years publicizing the horrors taking place in his native land. In Republic of Fear (1989) and Cruelty and Silence (1993) he chronicled the instruments of repression used by Saddam Hussein to brutalize his people and to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings after the Gulf War.

Now Makiya warned the audience of 200 that he would be striking a "discordant note" with the rest of the panel. "When you look at this coming war from the point of view of the people who are going to pay the greatest price—the people of Iraq—they overwhelmingly want it," Makiya declared. He discussed the steps he and other Iraqi exiles were taking to convince the Bush Administration to make the installation of a democratic government in Baghdad one of its chief war aims. And he urged those in attendance to support that goal. A war to overthrow Saddam, he said, "could have enormous transformative power throughout the Middle East." If there is even a "sliver of a chance—even 5 to 10 percent—that what I'm talking about might happen," Makiya said, those committed to bringing democracy and justice to the world have a "moral obligation" to support military action in Iraq. Amid applause from the audience, the other panelists shifted uncomfortably.
...
"If we're going to invade, the President has a responsibility to make his case—to explain how long it will take, and what resources we'll have to put in," says Mark Danner, who has written extensively about Haiti and Bosnia. "He's not doing that. We have to read about postwar plans in the New York Times. It's remarkable." Danner, who in early October joined such other liberals as Derek Bok, Aryeh Neier and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in signing an ad in the Times opposing the war, says, "The most forceful argument for going to war is helping the Iraqi people. But that's not the reason for this war. I don't remember anybody in the Administration talking about the Iraqi people before August. Rather, it's about America's larger strategic goals in the region. They're going to get rid of this guy, then get out. During the 2000 campaign, George Bush was totally against nation-building. And I don't see any sign of change in that."

Word and World in New York [Arab News]
The Moral Quandary: Anti-imperialism vs. Humanitarianism [The Nation]
New Yorker pieces by Mark Danner
Kanan Makiya interview [Frontline, 2002]