The Trouble with Dictatorship..
There is a lot of talk about bringing back a benign dictator to rule Iraq, to bring back a measure of stability and security at the expense of democracy. There is more than talk about dictatorship in Iraq; many militia leaders, insurgents and even some American servicemen who truly believe that they will only stabilize Iraq if they can scare the population more than Saddam did, all understand that fear plays into the hands of the strong ruler, but the situation in reality is too complex, too much terror is directed towards the innocent; it took Saddam many years of building his intelligence machine and backstage conspiracies before he unleashed the full force of his fear machine. Saddam did kill many innocent civilians but had more direction than the auction of terror that’s ruling Baghdad today.
On Nov. 19, 2006, Henry Kissinger said to the Los Angeles Times that he “would have preferred a post-invasion policy that installed a strong Iraqi leader from the military or some other institution and deferred the development of democracy.” This would have been a good policy if the secular Iraqi army was not disbanded, the Turkish model of democracy would work better than the chaos of today. Now the only choice of a dictator is one of many islamists. The Iraqi elections became the straitjacket of U.S. policy; the choice of a possible benign dictator, if not from the largest elected shia coalition party then the choice will undermine the legitimacy of the current government by discrediting the elections, which is not a bad thing if done properly and not by a coup d’etat. The good choices are very few.
Saddam has set the highest standard of terror, it is difficult for any future dictator to compare with him, this is the trouble with dictatorship, any new dictator will be less fearful and the country will be less stable using the same tools. It would be far better to go in the other direction of more freedom, more elections and more transparency. Iraqis like clean elections, many defied real danger to their lives in order to cast their votes during the last one, then they found out about widespread incidents of coersion and allegations of rigging which were left un-investigated, and then an “international” committee came to investigate but had no mandate to open the ballot boxes. We don’t need dictators, we don’t need political correctness that glosses over bad elections, we don’t need the Israeli model of democracy, it is the only country in the world ruled by religeous laws. We had democracy during the monarchy for a longer period than Saddam’s rule, it was not perfect but it didn’t have the coersion and fraud allegations as much as the last one. Those who claim that Iraqis are not ready for democracy are either playing along political correctness or do not know much about the history of Iraq.