There Are No Good Dictators

Robert Kagan was a Neo-Con architect of our disastrous Iraq invasion, but he is also a legitimate "Never Trump" guy, in ways that quite a few Neo-Cons (Max Boot, Bill Kristol) are.  He makes an interesting argument that serves a sort of endorsement of Iraq in terms of the idea of spreading democracy, by force if necessary (though that doesn't appear in the op-ed piece above).

The basic idea is that we routinely convince ourselves that "this" dictator is actually a really good guy who will eventually help build the institutions of democracy.  We liked Saddam, because he was a bulwark against Iran.  We liked the Shah, because he was a bulwark against communism.  That naive embrace of dictators is one of the reasons why we have such a dysfuncational foreign policy in the Middle East.  While we did pivot away from supporting people like Pinochet and the apartheid regime in South Africa, we continued this policy of believing that THIS Middle Eastern despot was actually a good guy to support.

The latest iteration of this is Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.  MBS did a few cosmetic reforms, like allowing women to drive, while destroying his enemies via a ruthless suppression campaign.  The Khashoggi assassination has ripped some of the mask off his PR-driven foreign policy, but Kagan is right to note that we have traditionally not been very forward thinking in how we support autocrats.  (I can remember Bush 43 and to a lesser degree Obama being suckered in by the idea that Putin might lead to reforms that truly democratized Russia.)

In fact, the way most dictatorships fall is by revolution.  Maybe it's peaceful (Eastern Europe, Mexico) but more likely it's violent.  And those violent revolutions swing wildly in the other direction.  The oil-fueled monarchs of the Middle East, with their pro-Washington, pro-Israel foreign policy, will collapse into Islamist regimes.  So we continue to support people like Mubarak or the House of Saud, because we fear the alternative.  All the while, our actions make sure that the coming alternative will be worse.

We are trapped a burning house, that we made out of kerosene soaked logs that we lit on fire ourselves.