The Shah of Iran was our choice to install and prop up after we disposed of Mosaddegh. Then, when the Shah became the problem, we pulled the carpet out from under him. Both acts, installing him and removing him, got us the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Source/Credit: Daily News | Blog
By Jonathan Dobrer | June 13, 201
We have a habit, a bad habit, of demonizing leaders whom we don’t like. We’re usually correct in seeing them as bad men—they are mostly men. We seem to believe that if we could only get rid of them wonderful things would happen to their nations and our world. This is the other side of the “Great Man” theory of history.
My first experience of this was Stalin and how we waited for him to die. There was a hope that the Soviet Union would throw off the chains he forged. And they did, some 40 years later. He was not an anomaly but the expression of his nation for that time. Had he died or been removed earlier or later, history would most likely not have been materially changed.
In this past decade we have fixated on some truly bad leaders and have been guilty of magical thinking, believing that the world would change, inevitably for the good, if only we could dispose of them. And we did dispose or help to dispose of many of them. However, to what end?
The Shah of Iran was our choice to install and prop up after we disposed of Mosaddegh. Then, when the Shah became the problem, we pulled the carpet out from under him. Both acts, installing him and removing him, got us the Ayatollah Khomeini.
We next thought we could save the entire Middle East by getting rid of that unique monster Saddam Hussein. He killed his own people, tortured people he suspected of being disloyal and slaughtered rival tribes and ethnicities with both conventional weapons and gas. Well, we got rid of Saddam, and today there is more violence and death in Iraq than under him. Today Iraq is a client state of Iran and in a state of civil war. Nouri al-Maliki was not the answer to the problem that was Saddam.
Gadaffi was portrayed as a crazy man, someone who was irrational with strange appetites for large blonde women. We seemed to take it on faith that whoever or whatever came next would be an improvement. Well, he’s gone—as is any stability or civility in Libya. In some ways Libya itself is gone and is at war with itself.
We were pretty sure that Bashir al-Assad was a bad guy who “killed his own people.” While this is true, any faith that whoever might come next will be better should seem naïve—for it surely is. Remember that Bashir, many experts thought, was going to be much better than the previous monster, his father Hafiz al-Assad. Didn’t turn out as forecast.
We've engaged in considerable magical thinking in Egypt, hoping that real democracy would come after Mubarak. It didn't. It isn't coming after Morsi either—al-Sisi being a not very benevolent dictator.
Now, as Iraq continues to self-destruct, we are starting to talk about “having to replace al-Maliki.” I hold no brief for Maliki; he has mismanaged Iraq as badly as Saddam, if only for a different Muslim sect. We do have to ask ourselves from whence cometh our faith in his replacement being better and not worse?
What empirical experience do we have in picking the winners and losers for other nations? You might think we’d have some well-earned modesty in our ambitions and expectations. You might think so, but you’d be wrong.
http://blogs.dailynews.com/friendlyfire/2014/06/13/devil/
©2014 Jonathan Dobrer
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