[Mb-civic] You know these BAD GUYS. But there is a whole other world of tyrants, dictators and despots. - Robert D. Kaplan - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

You know these BAD GUYS. But there is a whole other world of tyrants, 
dictators and despots.
Old States, New Threats
<>By Robert D. Kaplan
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, April 23, 2006; B01

Crossing a border has always carried a special drama. Moments after my 
train crossed from Hungary to Romania in the 1980s -- from a country run 
by a liberal communist regime to one under the banana republic-style 
jackboot of Nicolae Ceausescu -- the Romanian customs officials tried to 
confiscate my typewriter. It was the reverse of my experience going from 
Iraq to Syria: The sense of fear left me as I departed Saddam Hussein's 
penitentiary state and entered a merely repressive dictatorship, where 
the worst thing that befell me was that news sources did not return my 
phone calls. More recently, when I crossed from the enfeebled democracy 
of Georgia to a province of southern Russia, overseen by the 
quasi-autocratic Vladimir Putin, the thuggery of the police suddenly 
intensified.

Borders may be eroding and stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda 
proliferating, but don't be fooled: The traditional state remains the 
most dangerous force on the international scene. Perhaps the greatest 
security threat we face today is from a paranoid and resentful state 
leader, armed with biological or nuclear weapons and willing to make 
strategic use of stateless terrorists.

These old-fashioned bad guys often have uncertain popular support, but 
that does not make them easy to dislodge. We don't live in a democratic 
world so much as in a world in the throes of a very messy democratic 
transition, so national elections combined with weak, easily politicized 
institutions produce a lethal mix -- dictators armed with 
pseudo-democratic legitimacy. And they come in many shapes and forms.

Of course, there are the traditional dictatorships like that of Iraq's 
Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, who have evoked the 
morbid, crushing tyrannies of antiquity, using personality cults to 
obliterate individual spirit and keep populations on a permanent war 
footing. Then there are warlord-cum-gangster states, including Slobodan 
Milosevic's Serbia and Charles Taylor's Liberia, where the face of the 
regime has been a thug in a ski mask or a child soldier bent on sadism. 
In these, the leader is surrounded by chaotic layers of criminal 
organizations that recall medieval chieftaincies and the beginnings of 
Nazi rule, before the brownshirts were eliminated in 1934 and Hitler 
consolidated power.

There are Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, built 
on economic anger and religious resentment, where oil and nuclear power 
have become symbolic fists raised against a perceived oppressor -- 
whether it be the gringos or the Great Satan. And there are the 
time-warp tyrannies, like that of dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has 
turned Belarus into the political equivalent of a Brezhnev-era theme 
park, and the shadowy Burmese generals who have kept their country in a 
condition of sepia-toned, post-World War II poverty, even as the rest of 
Asia has undergone economic growth. There is the comic-opera, natural 
gas-rich regime of Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan, with his 
Disneyfied personality cult and slogans ("Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi," 
ghastly echo of "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and the grim, 
unrelenting thuggery of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, where bitterness 
against former white rulers has become a pretext for grabbing wealth.

These categories are loose and overlapping. What they have in common is 
that the rulers can exploit the whole panoply of state power, without 
regard for the will of the people. The irony of Iran has been that, for 
years now, a significant portion of its population has been decidedly 
less anti-American than almost any other state in the Middle East, and 
yet the clerics and their lumpenproletariat revolutionary cohorts like 
Ahmadinejad have, through manipulated elections, been able to retain 
control of the security and foreign policy establishments. Chavez, 
Mugabe and Lukashenko are also hated by vital parts of their populations.

Because states are harder and more complex to rule now (the result of 
urbanization, rises in population and independent media), a strongman 
requires not only coercion but an energizing ideology to whip his 
supporters into a frenzy and keep opponents at bay.

Television also puts individual charisma at a premium. While advanced 
democracies in the West tend to produce bland, lowest-common-denominator 
leaders, less open electoral systems, in which a lot of muscle and 
thuggery is at work behind the scenes, have a greater likelihood of 
producing rabble-rousers.

And there also is an economic component. The fist that Ahmadinejad and 
Chavez hold up to America is a sign of deep unhappiness and latent 
instability at home. But do not expect sanctions to weaken the Iranian 
regime or, more particularly, the Hamas-led Palestinian government: 
Shared sacrifice can help mobilize the population behind a regime, 
especially one that has come to power through popular decree.

Social tensions have exploded as a result of the unleashing of market 
economies that create rapid but uneven growth. The backlash of the 
have-nots has led not only to Chavez's rule in Venezuela, but also to 
the election of the leftist populist Evo Morales in Bolivia -- an 
indigenous Aymara who stands against the forces of globalization. 
Morales has cut his salary in half and has called capitalism "the worst 
enemy of humanity." Upon assuming office, he made visits to Venezuela 
and Fidel Castro's Cuba. In moral terms, he is not a bad guy, let alone 
a war criminal, but he is part of a leftist drift in Latin America that 
poses challenges for U.S. interests.

Meanwhile, cold-turkey democracy in Russia in the 1990s has produced a 
backlash in the form of Putin's low-calorie autocracy, more popular 
among Russians than Yeltsin's regime. And the failure so far of 
democracy in Iraq only strengthens the hand of Syria's Bashar al-Assad 
next door in maintaining his sterile, Baathist grip over Damascus. For 
Russians and Syrians, personal security comes before Western-style freedom.

The most suffocating of these dictatorships sit atop a cauldron of 
anarchy. For they rule by eliminating all legitimate forms of social 
organization between the ruler on top and the tribe and extended family 
below. Removing such leaders, while morally justified, is fraught with 
risk. Nobody should think a regime collapse in North Korea would be any 
prettier than it has been in Iraq. The breakdown of a governing 
infrastructure, combined with the guerrilla mentality of the Kim family 
regime's armed forces, could spawn widespread lawlessness, with 
insurgencies led by former generals vying for control.

What's more, the enduring difficulties in Iraq -- I supported the 
invasion -- should stand as a warning for how to handle North Korea, all 
of whose neighbors, including China, are on much better terms with the 
United States than were Iraq's.

Despite the dangers they represent, such crushing, Dear Leader tyrannies 
are not our major concern. The future problems of the United States lie 
more with regimes that thrive on information exchanges with the global 
media, using it as their megaphone, in the way Chavez does, and ones in 
such a condition of underdevelopment, tribal animosity and physical 
insecurity (take Taylor's Liberia) that the state, to the extent it 
exists, becomes psychologically isolated from any mitigating global forces.

Globalization is a cultural and economic phenomenon -- not a system of 
international security. Indeed, the notion that a state's sovereignty 
carries less weight these days because the international community will 
not tolerate grave human rights abuses seems relevant only in the case 
of poor, marginal states like Liberia, Somalia and Haiti, where no great 
power has an overriding interest in maintaining the regimes. 
Nevertheless, just look at how hard it has been to get Sudan's 
president, Omar Hassan Bashir, to cooperate in alleviating the 
humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur. As for Taylor, multilateral action 
has finally brought him to justice, but only after the "Lord of the 
Flies"-style children's army he supported killed and mutilated thousands 
of people in Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, the tyrants from big states continue to use the global media 
as an equalizing weapon against the United States and the rest of the 
West. They may also use what Yale political science professor Paul 
Bracken calls "disruptive technologies," referring to nuclear and 
biological weapons -- the secrets of which cannot ultimately be 
protected. A host of new powers, particularly in the Middle East and 
Asia, can, by concentrating on such technologies, render our tanks, 
bombers and fighter jets impotent. Our military edge against these 
traditional bad guys is slipping even as our military gets better 
because our relative power in the world depends on a status quo that 
cannot be maintained.

We are entering a well-armed world, with more players than ever who can 
unhinge the international system and who have fewer reasons to be afraid 
of us. That's why a resentful state leader, armed with disruptive 
technologies and ready to make use of stateless terrorists, poses such a 
threat. Hussein was a wannabe in this regard. According to a Joint 
Forces Command study, parts of which appeared in the May/June issue of 
Foreign Affairs, he was preparing thousands of paramilitary fighters 
from throughout the Arab world to defend his regime and to be used for 
terror attacks in the West. Looking ahead, Ahmadinejad would also be a 
prime candidate for such tactics, as would Chavez, given his oil wealth 
and the elusive links between South American narco-terrorists and Arab 
gangs working out of Venezuelan ports.

We face a world of unfriendly regimes, even as our European allies are 
compromised by burgeoning Muslim populations and the Russians and 
Chinese deal amicably with dictators, because they have no interest in a 
state's moral improvement. Never before have we needed a more unified 
military-diplomatic approach to foreign policy. For the future is a 
multidimensional game of containment.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and author 
of "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" (Random House).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101772.html
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