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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (108654)	7/31/2003 9:30:33 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "Qusai had more than enough experience." Dictatorship survivability is not about "experience". If it were, long lived dictators would create long lived dynsasties all the time. Nor is it about brutality, that's something that any fool could do. If brutality is the only thing that made dictatorships last a long time, there would never be a dictatorship that fell, LOL. It is fairly well known that Saddam's two sons were hated more than Saddam. For dictators, that's a problem. The basic problem of the dictator is that no matter how much "power" he has, he is only one rather insignificant creature, only a very tiny portion of his land. To keep control, he has to have a lot of people who help him. It is the inability to get people to like him, and to help him control (as opposed to helping themselves) that gets most potential dictators into trouble. But Saddam's regime was also "Baathist", and it would be through the Baathist party that the next successor would likely have been selected. This is how the Communist party in the USSR handled succession. The first few party leaders were leaders "for life", but the party gradually grew stronger while the dictators grew weaker. Eventually the dictators were no longer able to control the country and it transformed itself into a sort of democracy. This is the path that Iraq was on, either a (very) slow change into democracy, or maybe something involving Islamic fundamentalism. -- Carl