The Next Saddam

I have this question nagging at me: who will be the next Saddam Hussein?

Wait a sec, you say, we haven't finished with this one.

True, but let's be prepared next time.

And how can we be prepared? Life was just going along, and suddenly the guy invaded Kuwait. What can you do about that?

Plenty.

The missing element in all the reporting about Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and the first Gulf War was any critical look at pre-war Iraq. From the decline of Soviet influence up until the tanks rolled across the border, Saddam was our ally. Yes, Saddam Hussein was violently suppressing internal dissent, and in general running a bloody-handed operation, but we can't expect the highest standards of morality from an oil state, can we? And think of all the Iranians he slaughtered. The U.S. doesn't like Iran because the Iranian fundamentalists pitched out the Shah, and the Shah was our ally. Yes, the Shah was violently suppressing internal dissent and in general running a bloody-handed operation, but we can't expect the highest standards of morality.....hey, wait a minute.

If you look back to 1963 - 1968, in the case of Iraq, and 1953, in the case of Iran, you will find that we launched both of these guys. It was covert foreign policy, courtesy of the CIA. Iraq’s General Kassem leaned towards the Soviets, so we plotted with the Baathists to topple him. In ’68, the CIA promoted the internal Baathist revolt that paved the way for Saddam. President Mossadeg in Iran intended to nationalize the Iranian oilfields, to the benefit of Iranians and the detriment of U.S. big oil, so he got whacked.

We got, respectively, twenty and twenty-five years for our money before the situation went bad. Bad for us, I mean. The bulk of Iraqis and Iranians didn't enjoy those decades very much, and the years since each respective blowup haven't been a stroll in the park, either. The Shah got old and sick, and his fed-up population revolted under the guidance of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In the case of Iraq, we suckered our strategy-impaired ally across the Kuwaiti border. April Glaspie, our ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam the whopper, “Your Arab-Arab conflicts are of no interest to us,” and he believed her. (She could have said, “One boot across the border and we’ll send half a million troops and a thousand planes to blast you to dust,” and history would be different.) Why did “Poppy” Bush do this? Perhaps he needed a popularity boost, or perhaps the Pentagon needed a new enemy to justify the budget. I suppose the real reason doesn't matter much to the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs.

The decades come and go, and our pocket dictators drop, one by one. In each case, we helped install them. In each case, we ignored their domestic brutality and thievery. In each case, they eventually got booted by their people or got independent ideas and we booted them. Or, in Saddam's case, we left the man in place while we starved his country, and then booted him. Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, Somoza, Mobutu, all gone, all left messes on the carpet.

And who's next? Are there any others out there, seemingly stable despots, torturing those pesky democracy-freaks and desperately trying to hide the cracks in the foundation? How are the Saudis? How about the Kuwaitis who stayed behind and fought the Iraqis while the Kuwaiti royalty ran away? How do they feel about being shoved aside when the big cheeses came home? There are probably some third-world countries we haven't thought about in years, slowly crumbling under fresh coats of paint.

My favorite candidate is Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan. He is a shameless thug, rigging elections, suppressing dissent, and torturing and killing political opponents. His masterpiece of evil was literally boiling two men to death. The U.S. government found Uzbekistan useful as a location for military bases and as a potential source of oil, so we backed him for years. Karimov got money, weapons, training, intelligence, and advice from us, and used it to strengthen his stranglehold on the miserable prison he rules. Uzbekistan gets high marks for regional instability, economic hardship, and a violently oppressed Islamic population. Karimov came to power in 1989, so he’s 16 years in, with an assassination attempt in 1999, and probably 4 to 9 years left on the clock. If Karimov was a publicly traded company, I’d start thinking about selling.

We should give our whole dictator/monarchy/president for life portfolio the once-over. I'd like to see a little preventative medicine, a little house cleaning. The old Truman policy of "Sure he's an s.o.b., but he's our s.o.b.!" is morally and pragmatically wrong. Eventually enough people die, enough disappear, enough are tortured, enough live their lives in hopeless poverty, so that a revolution comes. We orchestrated the misery so we end up as the bad guys. We keep mistaking a time bomb for a household appliance. It buys us some cheap oil, farm products and consumer goods in the meantime, but cheap at what price? Our reputation? Our tax dollars? Our manufacturing jobs? Our sons and daughters in uniform? Our souls?

Comments

[Not a Jedi Yet]

I nominate Mubarek in Egypt to be on a top-five 'next Saddam?' list - long-running, repressive non-Democratic regime (though not AS bad as the lunatic Karimov), oppressed and increasingly radicalized Islamic masses, economic difficulties, political hotspot - all the ingredients are there...

So far, Mubarek has been able to keep the lid on the cobra basket, but in the last few years the cobras have been bumping the lid hard, and there's no sign that he sees any other path to take beyond piling on more rocks and hoping to hold on. We of course look the other way, sell him arms, and sometimes send somebody over there so his security guys can torture them for us, but mostly our plan seems to be to cross our fingers and hope for the best. Because, I guess, we've had such *excellent* luck with that strategy in the past, in places like Iran, Zaire, Nicaragua...oh wait.