YEAH, BUT HE'S OUR S.O.B.

Left in charge as prime minister is a smooth-talking former Baathist, Ayad Allawi, groomed in exile by the Central Intelligence Agency since the early 1990s. Unlike his erstwhile rival, Ahmad Chalabi (who was groomed by the Defense Department, but always remained a bit too much the wily oriental gentleman for American public tastes), Allawi comes across as more of a regular guy, maybe even a potential golfing partner. He understands what the Americans want, and as long as we're behind him with our troops and our billions, he may be able to get it. But let's not pretend he's a nascent democrat, even if he manages to hold some cosmetic elections.

Allawi is best understood as the anointed dictator in waiting. His job is to do whatever needs doing to impose order on the current chaos. Martial law, ruthless repression, you name it. With American firepower to back him up, he's more than ready to take the blame for any rough stuff. Allawi's defense minister proudly vows to chop off the hands and heads of terrorists. As Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have said about an infamous Nicaraguan dictator, "He's a son of a bitch, but at least he's our son of a bitch."

Problem is, these SOBs, once they've solved our immediate problems, create new ones. They aren't ours at all. They're in this for themselves. And they become the vehicles of disillusionment with everything that we Americans think we represent.
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Nazis, Communism, Islamism--the threats varied, but the responses were the same down through the decades. After our SOB the Shah was overthrown by radical Islamists in 1979, we started looking for a new strongman who would stand with us against the commies and the Islamic tide now represented, not by the mufti, Haj Amin Husseini, but by the Ayatollah Khomeini. That new SOB, you might recall, was Saddam Hussein.

I'd like to think we could break out of this cycle, and that's precisely what President Bush says he wants to do: stop supporting dictators just because they say we share the same enemies; start to build real democracies (after the enemy is eliminated, and a few hands and feet are cut off). But we shouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world remains deeply skeptical. We may have forgotten all this history. But they haven't. And when they look at it, the phrase that leaps to mind is not "let freedom reign." It's "yanqui go home."

The whole article is here.