8
Be Careful What You Wish For
There are dictators a bit worse than me, no? I’m the lesser evil already.1
Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus
After close to half a century in power, the tyrant has fallen. He seemed to be immortal to many, but his rule and life have finally come to anend. At the hastily arranged funeral, the regime’s flags fly everywhere and even though half of the attendees despised the old man for hisimpulsiveness and cruelty, they do their best to hide it.
Out on the streets and in front of the nation’s television screens, the dictator’s enemies rejoice – those that had been tortured, those thathad been harassed. It hadn’t just been a rumour; the decades-long nightmare was over.
But is it? Sometimes, the answer is yes. The bad dream ends and as the tyrant no longer has a grip over the country, there’s a chance thatdemocracy may get a foot in the door. But more often than not, the answer is no. When tyrants fall – whether they are exiled abroad, are ina coffin or a jail cell – things frequently stay the same or get even worse. Most are replaced by new dictators. Only 20 per cent of fallenautocratic leaders from 1950 to 2012 were followed by democracy.2
In the worst case, the result of a fallen tyrant isn’t just another tyrant but violent conflict and chaos. But if the dictator is the source of acountry’s suffering, shouldn’t his removal from power be a step in the right direction?
Not necessarily. Islam Karimov, the Uzbek dictator who became infamous for a regime that boiled people alive, reportedly liked to say‘no man, no problem’.3 When it comes to dictatorial succession, the opposite is often true: no man, many problems. That’s becausethe reality isn’t ‘no man’: it’s many men now fighting to become the man.
When a democratic leader dies in office or loses an election, everybody knows what happens next. There’s a process; there are rules andinstitutions that oversee both. Immediate successors might be chosen in backroom deals, but sooner or later new leaders must face votersat the ballot box. If they manage to persuade a majority of voters, or at least the voters that matter, the successors then stay in power for alimited amount of time – until, that is, the next election, when, the democratic cycle is repeated.
In political systems with limits on the time any one person can govern, such as the United States, where presidents can serve a maximum ofeight years, the rules are even more stringent and frequent turnover is not just the norm but a legal requirement. In personaliseddictatorships, none of this exists. There might be some rules on paper that are supposed to matter when a dictator is on his way out, butthey don’t matter when it actually happens.
Tyrants, power permitting, aim to create a system that revolves entirely around themselves. Functioning institutions, for example in theform of an effective civil service or independent judiciary, are merely a hindrance. To the extent that other centres of power continue toexist, tyrants try to insert themselves into their disputes as the adjudicating force.4 Instead of forging a compromise that different groupscan live with, the tyrant picks winners and losers and enforces his judgement though repression. That doesn’t mean that the interests ofcompeting power centres have gone away, but there’s a lid on top of it all that prevents the intrigues and the scheming from descendinginto shooting.
When it looks as if the dictator could fall, that lid is blown off, tensions boil over, and everyone starts conspiring to make sure that theirinterests come out on top. Conflict behind the scenes turns into fighting in the palace – or on the streets.
And when tyrants fall, euphoria can turn to tragedy. Shouts of victory quickly become screams for help.
In the spring of 2019, people were dancing in the streets of Khartoum.5 Women were singing, civilians were riding on tanks alongside menin uniform to celebrate their freedom and the promise that things could get better. What started as a peaceful uprising over the price ofbread had, through twists and turns, led to the end of the rule of Omar al-Bashir, who had been in charge of the Nile dictatorship for morethan three decades. It was a moment of triumph.
But even though peaceful protestors had caused Bashir to stagger, it was the military that brought about his fall. And now that the militarywas in charge, they weren’t going to give up power easily.
Young Sudanese men and women, hopeful for their country’s future, decided to stage a sit-in on Buri Road in central Khartoum, rightnext to the headquarters of the Sudanese military. There were protestors there at all hours of the day for weeks on end; the demonstratorshad even set up tents. It was intense, but also cheerful. The protestors sang, danced, played instruments. Sometimes the soldiers joined in.At one point, a man in khaki could be seen playing a saxophone.
But then, on 3 June, darkness fell over the camp as the power cut out. Armed men on pick-up trucks started arriving and the rumoursstarted flying. Then, the violence started. With the chaos that day, it was difficult even for people in the vicinity of Buri Road to work outwhat was happening, but open-source intelligence researchers at the BBC have reconstructed the day’s events.6 The men who arrivedon pick-ups were part of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Under the control of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF grew out of militiaforces that were used by al-Bashir to put down rebellions on Sudan’s periphery. With Omar al-Bashir gone, Dagalo and his men werenow part of the Transitional Military Council (TMC) whom the protestors wanted to push towards accepting civilian control.
As the security forces advanced, they took aim at unarmed protestors. ‘Kill them! Kill them,’ they shouted. As the TMC’s forces movedforward, they started beating and looting. Some of the tents that protestors had erected were burned down.7
In the footage livestreamed that day, a man films the ground as gunfire can be heard. As the camera moves, it comes across the lifelessbody of a young man, lying with his face on the ground. ‘Somebody has been shot,’ the cameraman shouts. ‘They killed someone!They killed someone here, people,’ he goes on. While he shouts, a third man in a blue shirt attempts to drag the body away, but he quicklylets go. And although the cameraman keeps shouting at the top of his voice, nobody seems to pay him any attention.
As the camera pans again, it becomes clear why not: the lifeless young man wasn’t the only one being shot. In this new camera angle,another person is being dragged away by two protestors while others flee in panic. Perhaps realising that there was nothing he could do tohelp, or because he knew that he himself could get shot at any moment, the camera-man begins to run. With the camera shaking from hislong strides, he runs shouting: ‘They are killing us, people.’
As the protestors ran for their lives, the security forces continued to shoot. Some ‘lucky’ protestors were able to get to a clinic, wherethe doctors and nurses saw serious injuries caused by gunshot, whipping, beating with metal and bayonets.8 Even a doctor treating theinjured was shot.9 Unfortunately, the horror didn’t end there. In a city famous for the confluence of the White and Blue Nile, protestors’corpses were later retrieved from the river – in some cases, with concrete bricks tied to their feet.10
As if this was not bad enough, things in Sudan then got even worse. After a brief period in which the military men agreed to share powerwith civilians, they took full control of the country on 25 October 2021, shattering the dream of democracy.11
Even then, the generals didn’t deliver stability. Instead, the men in uniform fought each other with increasingly devastatingconsequences for the rest of the country. In the spring of 2023, conflict between the general in charge of Sudan’s ruling council and hisdeputy turned deadly as their forces clashed with each other in the centre of the capital, where protestors had once danced to celebratethe end of the al-Bashir dictatorship.12 Only this time, the fighting wasn’t limited to small arms fire. Instead, Dagalo’s Rapid SupportForces and the regular military fought each other with rocket launchers and artillery. Even airstrikes started to rain down on Khartoum. Theopen warfare between Dagalo, the man in control of the RSF, and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the military’s top general, dragged an entirecountry down with them. It is likely that thousands of civilians were killed and more than five million fled.13
Dictatorships have a tendency not simply to collapse upon themselves but to go up in flames, burning everyone and everything along theway. And even though countries could theoretically emerge from the chaos like a phoenix from the ashes, chaos is frequently followed bymore of the same. The tyrant might have come to an end, but tyranny has not. It’s not a linear transition, but a cycle that simply seems torepeat itself. In this way, many countries live under constant tyranny, only interrupted by the brief moments when one dictator walks outof the back door of the palace only for another to walk in through the gates shortly after. A large part of this dictatorial succession problemis due to the interests of the incumbent. Left to their own devices, dictators are rarely keen on designating a successor or deciding on ameaningful process to find one once they are no longer around. As we have learned above, the survival of autocrats depends on theperception of their strength. Once they designate a successor, they risk weakening themselves while empowering someone else who nowhas a strong interest in replacing them.
If done badly, planning for succession can be the equivalent of handing the murder weapon to an opponent who wants to stab the tyrantin the back. Tyrants, then, often resist organising the succession because they believe it will accelerate their fall. Whether the country goesup in flames or not after they’re no longer in office is, at best, of secondary importance.
When tyrants lose power, it’s a chance for those who were a part of the regime but who were previously kept down to improve theirposition. Perhaps they even want to take the lead themselves? These challengers want change, but they only want it insofar as it advancestheir interests. That means they don’t want democracy or to give power to the people. They aren’t opposed to the system itself, simplyprotective of their position within it. Then there are elites that already occupy the apex of the regime’s system. These people, enjoying thefavour of the previous ruler, seek to defend their position in order to maintain access to power and money. Their priority isn’t changingthe system, it’s preventing it from collapse so they can continue to enjoy its benefits.
When the despot is unseated, the interests of the masses will be diametrically opposed to those of the old guard and the challengers withinthe regime. The masses don’t want a redistribution of power and money within the regime, but from the regime to its citizens. The bestway to achieve this is through democratisation, for as the country becomes more democratic, the size of the winning coalition expands.And the more people are required to maintain power, the more resources must be devoted to keeping them happy.14
Finding a compromise is all but impossible and the stakes are high. Under those circumstances, any group that thinks it can gain an upperhand by using violence will be tempted to do so. And at once, backroom conflict can turn into real-world shooting. When that happens,the masses tend to lose out because their competitive advantage doesn’t lie in the use of violence.
A version of this dictatorial succession problem is also what derailed the transition in Sudan. Plenty of people wanted Omar al-Bashir to go– the protestors, the military generals, as well as the RSF leaders, all wanted him to go. What they couldn’t agree on was what wassupposed to come next. The former wanted a transition to democracy, the latter wanted a man in uniform to be in charge – although eventhey couldn’t agree which man it should be.
As a general rule, the more personalised a regime is, the more disruptive the fall of the tyrant will be.15 If the system revolves around asingle leader, his being out of the picture can easily bring the entire machine to a halt.
That stands in contrast to one-party dictatorships, which have built-in mechanisms for succession. One-party dictatorships systems arealso geared towards keeping the leader in power, but there are institutions other than the leader himself that can stabilise the regime whenthe leader is gone. And in many cases, these party-based systems have mechanisms to deal with the inevitable disputes that will arise whena new leader has to be chosen.
Whether or not effective succession rules are in place depends in large part on the power of the palace elites versus the incumbent. Thedictator, king or sultan might not be keen on naming a successor, but palace elites often are. They don’t care about the individual tyrantso much as about the continuation of tyranny, because it is the affiliation with the regime rather than the despot himself that gives themtheir power. Their nightmare scenario is a free-for-all in which challengers openly fight it out for the top position, thereby causing a civilwar that threatens the survival of the entire political order. The fear is justified.
Back in the European Middle Ages, autocratic succession substantially increased the risk of civil war.16 But then, over time, successionrules in these absolute monarchies became more codified and rigid. Around the year 1000, it was perfectly normal for European kings tobe succeeded by their brothers.17 This system, known as ‘agnatic seniority’, and is a nightmare for tyrants because it means that time isagainst them: the age difference between the king and his brother tends to be small and the younger brother, knowing that he will be nextin line to the throne, has a huge interest in seeing the monarch die so he can succeed him. From the perspective of the king, that’scertainly suboptimal.
A better system for the king, and one that more and more of these monarchies moved to, is ‘primogeniture’. Under that system, theperson to succeed a ruler after death is his eldest son rather than his brother.18 Because the age difference between crown prince and kingtends to be large, the crown prince can afford to remain loyal until his father’s death in the confidence that he will outlive him.19
But if that’s the case, why not just pass the throne to the youngest rather than the eldest child to maximise the age difference? That systemis called ‘ultimogeniture’ and it has one big flaw that is connected to the elites who keep the machine running. Unlike the oldest son,who has had more time to build his own power base over time, the youngest son cannot guarantee that he will be able to reward the eliteafter he comes to the throne.20 These little tweaks as to who gets left out in the cold and who gets to ascend the throne, make a giganticdifference to the survival of leaders and regimes. The main beneficiary of this are the palace elites who can continue to reap the benefits oftheir position as the country avoids a devastating struggle for the throne. Moreover, if the succession is properly organised, it can alsoincrease the tenure of the tyrants themselves.
As over the centuries more and more European monarchies switched from the medieval system of agnatic seniority to primogeniture,their ability to handle the succession massively increased. A study of 960 monarchs reigning in forty-two European states from 1000 to1800 found that monarchs operating under the rule of primogeniture were more than twice as likely to survive in power as those whoruled in states with other systems of succession.21
Powerful members of the court want to benefit from supporting the regime for as long as they can. If they feel that the king’s death couldlead to the end of their privileges since it will also lead to the end of the regime, they are less likely to continue providing that support andmore likely to support moves against the monarch. But if they think that the chance of a (potentially devastating) civil conflict is reducedthrough the existence of a designated successor, the incumbent might be in less peril. Obviously, this also extends to the successor itself.Now that he or she is appointed to become the next ruler there’s a sizeable incentive to maintain the current system as opposed tosubverting it. All they have to do is wait in order to ascend to the throne. And indeed, appointing a successor can extend the ruler’s reignby virtue of creating someone to shield the regime from its opponents.22
Many rulers of non-democracies thus see clear succession rules as a way to make their rule more stable.23 In Syria, Hafez al-Assadplanned to pass power to his eldest son Basil.24 When Basil died in a car crash, Bashar, Basil’s younger brother, became the chosen one.The circumstances were unusual. Whereas Basil had long been groomed to take over, Bashar was training in ophthalmology at a Londonhospital and was said to have little interest in politics. Nevertheless, Syria’s Baath Party leaders agreed to support Bashar as the best wayof preserving the system and avoiding internal feuding.25 Bashar might not have been perfect, but he was viewed as the least bad option.As it was, all the other serious contenders were systematically removed from the political scene by Hafez al-Assad in the years before hisdeath.26
There’s another factor that has a big influence on what happens after a tyrant falls: the manner of his fall. The consequences of varyingforms of ‘leadership exit’ differ hugely.
When a journalist asked a fruit seller a year after Armenia’s Velvet Revolution how things had changed, she replied that only an idiotwould think a revolution would change everything. The white-haired woman, sitting in front of cardboard boxes full of onions, apples andtomatoes, added: ‘A revolution is like getting an empty new house; you still have to fix it up and furnish it.’27 That woman was right. Apeaceful uprising is a chance to create something better, but it doesn’t solve every problem at once. It doesn’t give teachers theresources they need to educate the next generation; it doesn’t bring back factories that have long disappeared; it doesn’t bring downthe price of bread or milk.28 And indeed, life in Armenia remained difficult after Nikol Pashinyan brought down the previous governmentin 2018. To some, it might have even felt worse. But after years of authoritarian rule in Yerevan, it was at least an opening, a chance for anew beginning.
Generally speaking, there’s the best chance of breaking through the cycle of tyranny if tyrants can be toppled through non-violentprotest. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found that a full 57 per cent of successfulnon-violent campaigns led to democracy. Of the changes that involved violence, it was less than 6 per cent.29 The reasons for this arevaried – among them, legitimacy. Toppling an entrenched authoritarian regime that may have survived for many decades by non-violentmeans necessitates the involvement of a large segment of the population. Now that the old regime has fallen, the new regime has apopular mandate to do things differently.
Because such a large number of people are involved, peaceful ways to adjudicate conflict have to be established. In power, they can usethat precedent to deal with other political actors without resorting to violence. That’s essential for the functioning of a democracy and itmeans that movements that have come to power through non-violence tend to be good at the business of politics.30 Because they are,they have an incentive to keep operating in a system in which those skills are valuable. That differentiates them from groups that takepower by force. They have the opposite skillset: they are good at using violence, but not negotiating. Since that’s where they have theiradvantage, why should they stop now that they have power? They won’t. They’ll keep wielding the sword rather than sheathing it.
In more autocratic regimes in which it is harder for the masses to mobilise, coups d’état tend to pose the biggest threat to dictators.When the men with guns take power, there are three main options: military dictatorship, a military-backed ruler, or democratisation. Indictatorships, about two out of three coups lead to a collapse of the entire political system and the birth of a new one.31 Now, that couldmean democracy, another dictatorship or something in between. Interestingly, the numbers on this have seen a significant change: only14 per cent of coups against dictatorships led to democracy during the Cold War, but during the next twenty-five years, that number shotup to 40 per cent.32
Another drawback to coups, though, is that they rarely come in ones. There’s a tendency for countries to become caught in a ‘couptrap’ once they experience even a single coup. In Thailand, for example, there were attempted coups in 1981, 1985, 1991, 1992 (twice),2006 and 2014.33 In part, this can be explained by societal norms. In a liberal democratic society such as Norway, a coup is almostunimaginable. Power matters in politics, but so does legitimacy – and the Norwegian government has plenty. Not only has it provided theNorwegian people with a high standard of living, it has also been elected in free and fair elections. And since there’s no recent history ofcoups, the soldiers of the Norwegian armed forces are unlikely seriously to consider the possibility of taking power. By contrast, a militaryjunta, having recently come to power through a coup d’état, has very little claim to it.34 Because a coup d’état can be carried out by asmall number of armed men and women, it’s difficult to tell whether the junta has popular legitimacy. In addition, the junta doesn’t yethave the advantage of being accepted simply because it has been in place for a long time.35 In combination, this makes the junta (andtheir successors) much more vulnerable to yet another coup, and then another. Escaping from the coup trap is not easy.
Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that some coups against some types of leaders might not be so bad.36 Coups are one ofthe few viable ways to get rid of some of the world’s worst dictators. They are unlikely to lead to a flourishing democracy but there aresome contexts in which there simply aren’t a lot of other options. Moreover, aren’t there situations in which getting rid of a particulartyrant would be desirable even if the country doesn’t turn into a democracy thereafter? It’s not difficult to imagine some scenarios inwhich that’s the case.
Benjamin Disraeli claimed that ‘assassination has never changed the history of the world.’37 Anecdotal evidence (the outbreak of theFirst World War, for example) aside, there’s some hard evidence to suggest that he was wrong. Killing tyrants can be fruitful. In a study onthe effect of assassinations on institutions and war, the economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken found that killing non-democraticleaders can increase the chances of democratisation in a given country. Killing democratic leaders, on the other hand, madecomparatively little difference.38 It’s an intuitive finding. In a personalised dictatorship, the death of a single man makes a much greaterdifference than it does in a mature liberal democracy.
Whereas assassinations are targeted only at the dictator or perhaps also his immediate circle, civil wars can be all-encompassing – oftenleading to hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, of deaths. The destructive force of these conflicts is in a league of its own. Andoften, the fall of the tyrant in a civil war is not even the end of the war (or tyranny). For example, when Idriss Déby died at the hands of rebelsin Chad in 2021, the regime didn’t fall and the war didn’t end. There wasn’t even a dictator with a new last name; histhirty-seven-year-old son simply took over, so Chad continued to be ruled by a Déby.
Like coups, civil wars have a tendency to repeat themselves. Some two out of ten civil wars flare up again within five years.39 So the tyrantfalls, a new leader comes in and the destruction continues. Often, this is because the underlying reason for the conflicts tends to persist.When the disaffected population on the periphery of a country rises up because the inhabitants are poor and without opportunity, theirgrievances don’t simply disappear when a ceasefire has been agreed.
But also, the new leader will will be tempted to keep fighting because he has a strong incentive not to be the leader who loses the war,especially if he is also part of the ruling elite which had a hand in starting it in the first place.40 Nobody wants to be responsible for losing,so they just keep fighting.
But even if the new leader did want to make peace with the rebels, he would have a hard time doing so. One of the reasons why it’s sodifficult for authoritarian regimes to make peace with rebels, even after one dictator has died, is that they struggle to make a crediblepromise to their opponents.41
To illustrate this, we have to travel to the northern shore of Africa’s second largest lake, Tanganyika. On the night of 13 August 2004, theresidents of Gatumba, a Burundian settlement on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, heard something unusual.42 To thewest, from across the marsh, there were sounds of drums, bells and whistles. As the sounds came closer, singing became audible. ‘Godwill show us how to get to you and where to find you,’ the shadowy figures sang.
Some, but not all, of the figures who were coming closer, wore military uniforms. Unbeknown to the residents of Gatumba, many ofwhom were refugees, the drummers and singers belonged to the Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL). Most of them were men, butsome were just children, so small that their weapons dragged along the ground.43
The FNL was a Hutu rebel group active in the Burundian civil war which began after the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s firstdemocratically elected president. By August 2000, after countless Burundians had lost their lives to the violence, the government ofBurundi signed a peace treaty with most of the country’s armed groups – but not with the FNL. The FNL, under the leadership of thenforty-nine-year-old Agathon Rwasa, kept fighting.
That night in Gatumba, the FNL’s fighters started firing. Most of their victims were Banyamulenge, an ethnic group from the Congofrequently categorised with Tutsi. Between the shots, the fires and the screaming, it was utter chaos. But despite the violence, some peoplethought they were going to be saved since the attackers shouted ‘come, come, we’re going to save you.’44
But nobody came to help. Instead, the rebels shot people who left their tents. Many of those who did not take that chance died insidethem, burned to death. The Washington Post later reported that one sixteen-year-old girl saw her mother die from a gunshot to the head,her brother decapitated and her father burned alive.45 In total, FNL fighters slaughtered more than 150 Congolese civilians and another106 were wounded. According to the United Nations most of the victims were women, children and babies; they were shot dead andburned.46
When I talked to Agathon Rwasa about the massacre in Gatumba, he refused to admit responsibility and said the way he’d been treatedas a result of the accusations had been an injustice. But despite maintaining his innocence, he made a point of saying that he was aChristian. ‘I believe in the strength of forgiveness,’ he added.47
The case of Rwasa demonstrates why it can be so difficult to put an end to civil wars. In 2004, Burundian authorities issued an arrest warrantfor him over the massacre.48 But for someone like that who is accused of war crimes, to stop fighting, he needs to believe not just thatmilitary victory is impossible, but also that the government will not go after him once he lays down arms. That isn’t easy, because notgoing after a rebel leader whose troops created so much suffering is an outrage. Two decades later, Rwasa hadn’t spent a single day injail over the Gatumba massacre. Instead, he managed to become deputy speaker of the Parliament of Burundi and even ran for thepresidency.49 He is far from being an outcast.
Democratic leaders are heavily constrained when it comes to cooperating with people like Rwasa because they need to keep voters ontheir side but tyrants can promise rebel leaders just about anything. They want amnesty? Sure. They want their soldiers to be integratedinto the regular military? Not a problem. They can make all the promises. However, laying down arms in exchange for a promise from adictator can be suicidal – it means nothing. Idriss Déby is a good example of this. When a rebel leader signed an accord and returned fromexile because he thought he was safe, he was killed in his N’Djamena home.50 Civil wars are not just extraordinarily deadly anddestructive, they are also difficult to end – especially for dictators.
That brings us to a change of regime imposed from abroad. In late March 2003, George W. Bush said: ‘These are opening stages of whatwill be a broad and concerted campaign.’51 Three weeks later, civilians and American soldiers pulled down a statue of Saddam Husseinin Baghdad’s Al-Firdos Square. Later that year, a dishevelled Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole near Tikrit. A vicious, brutaldictator was toppled, found and executed.
But at what price? Thousands of American soldiers and contractors were killed. The war cost the American taxpayer billions. Moreimportantly, it cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and the country was devastated by the war and an ensuing insurgency. Not only that, itdestabilised the entire region and contributed to the rise of the Islamic State (IS) as a serious military risk. So why did the operation fail?Was it about America and Iraq in particular, or is there something about foreign-imposed regime change more generally that alwaysmade failure likely? Both.
One of the big problems of replacing a foreign regime through force from abroad is that the attacker needs to decide what to do with theremnants of the old regime. Do you purge? If you do, you destroy the people who know how to govern and you give them an incentive totorpedo the transition to a new system of government. If you don’t, the transition is at risk because the loyalty of those who havepreviously worked for the dictator cannot be taken for granted.
In Iraq, the Americans decided in favour of purging. Between 12 May 2003 and 28 June 2004, Paul Bremer was the man in charge of theCoalition Provisional Authority (CPA).52 In that role, he was something of a governor for the country, except that he wasn’t elected bythe Iraqi people or held accountable by any type of Iraqi legislature. Bremer issued his first order as CPA administrator within four days ofbeing in the role. In section 1, paragraph 2 and 3, it stated that many members of the Baath Party and government officials were to beremoved from their positions. Some of them were also banned from being employed in the public sector in the future.53 In a secondorder, issued later that month, Bremer formally disbanded the Iraqi security forces.54
At first, both of these orders might sound like a good idea. The Baath Party had been responsible for human rights violations in Iraq fordecades. Surely nobody who had been close to them should now have access to the levers of power?
It’s more complicated than that. The order on de-Baathification might have affected around eighty-five thousand Iraqis, manythousands of whom weren’t enthusiastic supporters of Saddam Hussein, but had simply joined the party to keep their work. Some ofthem were teachers, others crucial to keep the lights on or the water flowing.55 The CIA station chief in Baghdad at the time warnedBremer: ‘By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.’56
With the disbandment of Iraqi security forces, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with previous military training went from being someoneto being unemployed. Now without income and angry, many of them had no incentive to accept the new status quo. A later report wouldfind that ‘these two orders severely undermined the capacity of the occupying forces to maintain security and continue the ordinaryfunctioning of the Iraq government.’57
And so it turned out. Some of Saddam Hussein’s former soldiers quickly began to organise armed resistance and by the autumn of 2003,the occupying forces had a serious insurgency on their hands.58 In October 2006, the Pentagon assessed that US forces were losing.59 Bythe following year, the situation had become so dire that President Bush decided to deploy an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq to try tocontain the violence.60
It’s a problem that’s difficult to solve more generally. After defeating Nazi Germany in the Second World War, for example, some of theAllies took the opposite course. Instead of trying to weed out everyone who had been involved with the Nazi regime, the occupiers west ofthe Elbe deliberately let former generals, judges and administrators continue working because they were more worried about adysfunctional Germany than one that contained remnants of the former regime. This had an impact on German politics all the way to thetop: in 1969, the chancellor of the Federal Republic was a man who had joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1933. Itwould be an understatement to say that denazification was incomplete.
When we examine foreign-imposed regime change more generally, the track record is abysmal and not only because it’s difficult to dealwith former elites. A study published in 2013 found that around 11 per cent of United States regime-change operations over a centuryended up creating democracy;61 barely more than one in ten. Despite democracy often being stated as the priority of the interveningstate, it usually isn’t.62 Democratic leaders want to stay in power and using force against another state is a massive risk. To most, it’ssimply not worth taking that risk unless national security is at stake. Advancing democracy is seen as a bonus, but it’s not reason enoughto go to war. And if democracy is not even the primary reason to go to war, why would democracy result from war?
President Kennedy understood these dynamics perfectly. During the Cold War, when Washington wanted to remove Ramfis Trujillo frompower in the Dominican Republic, Kennedy said:
There are three possibilities of descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or aCastro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure we can avoid the third.63
When democratic leaders go on television and the news anchor asks them about their motivations for intervening, that’s not whatthey’ll say – but back in the situation room, that’s how they’ll act.
On top of that, there are cases where democracy isn’t just seen as less important than national security, but where it is seen as a netnegative.64 If a tyrant is replaced with a democratic leader, that democratic leader will have more of an interest in winning elections than indoing the bidding of a foreign power. Indeed, democracy exporters could end up in a situation in which they expend blood and treasureto install a democratic government only to find that government turns around and acts against them.
There’s something of a paradox here. If foreign-imposed regime change is (partly) about creating a sustainable democracy, there aretwo main factors to consider. The first is the likelihood of success, which differs greatly since some countries are vastly more likely to turninto democracies than others. All else being equal, it’s much easier to turn a rich country with a history of democratic rule into ademocracy than it is to transform a poor personalised dictatorship in which no popular vote has ever been held.65
The other factor to consider is the complexity of the military intervention necessary to bring down the regime. Deposing leaders at the topof stable countries with functioning institutions (such as Imperial Japan), which have the best chance of democratising, tends to be costlybecause those institutions generate military effectiveness. Deposing leaders at the top of poor personalised dictatorships might be easier,but the chances of success are lower because there’s no foundation for a democracy.66 Democracy exporters can thus either win an‘easy war’ for a low chance of a sustainable outcome or a ‘hard war’ with a high chance of more positive results. Since hard war canmean hundreds of thousands of deaths, it’s rarely worth it.
So given the terrible odds, why do attempts to change a regime through force happen as often as they do? It’s partly hubris. Politicianstend to believe that this time round, things will go differently. Perhaps they think they are particularly intelligent, that they won’t fall intothe traps to which their predecessors succumbed.
But also, the alternatives are often dire. In the abstract, you might know that the use of force is unlikely to create a flourishing democracy.But in that moment, when the head of foreign intelligence tells you that a dictator is about to barrel-bomb hospitals and street markets,would the numbers really guide your decision-making? Or would you take a chance and try to destroy the dictator’s attack helicoptersbefore they lift off? Even with all the data in the world, it would be an impossible decision.
All these scenarios envisage dictators being toppled, but there’s also the option that they go to bed, never to wake up again. And indeed,this happens not infrequently because plenty of dictators are long-lived. Cameroon’s Paul Biya was still in power at the age of ninety; inEquatorial Guinea next door, Teodoro Obiang, at eighty-one. Fidel Castro died aged ninety. Robert Mugabe made it to the ripe age ofninety-five before dying in a Singaporean hospital.
Oddly enough, not much tends to happen when dictators ‘just fall asleep’. In a report that analysed the aftermath of seventy-ninedictators dying in office, it was found that only 8 per cent of these deaths led to a collapse of the previous regime.67 And democracyalmost never follows. Some might consider these numbers surprising. The dictator is dead. Surely that’s the best opening there couldpossibly be to take the country in a different direction? By and large, that’s not what happens.
Speaking of soldiers, people sometimes say: ‘Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.’ What applies towarriors also applies to dictators. Despots who die in office have usually staved off their fair share of threats throughout their rule. Whenthey fall asleep in their golden bed, the regime is not likely to collapse because the system is entrenched and ready for the change.Everyone knows their place and the machinery hums along under these extraordinary circumstances. In comes the new leader.
Even if the new leader wants to make drastic changes, it will be difficult for him to do so because ruling without the old guard will be next toimpossible. And why would the men and women who surrounded the old leader want to dismantle the system that has served them sowell? They usually don’t, so they will pick someone who doesn’t want to rock the boat. If, contrary to expectations, their choice tries todo things differently, he is unlikely to get far.
A researcher at Harvard University recently argued that leaders are only ‘allowed’ to die in their sleep if the elites are already set on asuccessor.68 If they weren’t, someone would try to get the advantage by moving against the incumbent while he was still alive. Since thathasn’t happened and the dictator has been allowed to die in peace, it’s likely there’s been some agreement between regime insidersthat makes drastic changes less likely.
There’s one more angle to this. The way a new leader comes to power doesn’t just tell us what type of political system we can expect, italso gives us a clue as to how stable it will be. When a new leader takes power, he is often in a comparatively vulnerable position.69 Thesituation is in flux and people don’t yet know their roles – they might even be tempted to challenge the new leader if they believe he isweak. But some modes of ‘leadership entry’ create much more stability than others.70
Assassinating someone is comparatively easy and it doesn’t telegraph much strength. Dismantling an entire political order through aregime-changing coup, a rebellion or massive protests, on the other hand, requires a much higher degree of support. When new leaderscome to power through those means, everyone understands that they are comparatively strong. As a result, those new leaders are lesslikely to face serious, immediate challenges to their rule because nobody wants to start a fight they will lose.
When tyrants fall and regimes collapse, the outcome is often catastrophic. Tyrants maintain power by picking winners and losers, andwhilst intrigue and backroom scheming do occur, all-out conflict is unlikely while they are firmly in the saddle. But as soon as they struggleand it looks as if they might fall, the situation escalates. Regime elites want to keep the regime alive to maintain their benefits; challengerswant to rise to the top, expanding their power and access to stolen money; the masses want to redirect resources from the regime to thepopulation at large, but they are usually too weak to compete with the insiders.
When the dust has settled and the bloodletting has stopped, people are often left to wonder whether it has all been worth it, given that thetyranny has not ended but merely assumed another name. This cycle of dictatorship–conflict–dictatorship is difficult to break, butsometimes it does happen if tyrants have been toppled the ‘right’ way. Now that we know how tyrants fall and what happens when theydo, how do we make it happen? And is it wise to try to make tyrants fall?
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