In a Nov. 14 panel on Fox News, conservative pundit William Kristol, in discussing the situation in Pakistan, gave us the amazing revelation about President Musharaff — whom he calls a “friendly and decent dictator” — that “The problem with these friendly dictators is they end up wanting to hang on, they like being dictators beyond when it is in their country’s national interest, and beyond when it is in our interest.”

In the first place, is this supposed to be some sort of intelligent insight? Of course dictators want to hang on: The nature of being a dictator is that you seize power and then keep it as long as humanly possible.Apparently that’s not something Kristol objects too as long as it’s in “our interest” to hang on to power. Which is no surprise; as much as our presidents, pundits and politicians talk about freedom and democracy, Washington never shows any qualms supporting oppressive governments — Noriega, Saddam, Marcos, the Saudi royal family, South Africa’s apartheid regime — when it seems to support our interest (it usually doesn’t, but that never occurs to anyone until too late).

Thus, for Kristol, the problem of “friendly and decent dictators” isn’t that the public no longer has the power to elect it’s leaders, the denial of human rights, the locking up of government critics, it’s that those darn dictators keep doing these things when we want them to stop and walk off into the sunset, as if American geopolitical goals would mean more to “friendly” dictators than their own self-interest. That’s the kind of assumption that leads to us supporting dictators in the first place.

Why, exactly, is anyone listening to this guy?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.