The world has seen ‘great men’ who rose to power and became abominable dictators of their people. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and a few others achieved leadership by claiming to be the best authority that the people could trust and maintained that power at the cost of millions of innocent lives, able to hold a candle to the vilification and the brutal murder of people under the rule of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. However, with the evolution of political machinations, these dictators have been outnumbered by today’s Machiavellian Princes.
Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was completed in 1513, almost five hundred years ago but its significance can still be depicted in present-day politics. The fundamental question that Machiavelli tried to answer was how a leader first acquires a coalition of support to attain power, and then sustains himself with it.
Many ‘great men’ in history, as well as in this day and age, had perpetuated themselves in power with a little help from their circle of political advisers and yet more substantially from their own perfected faculties of speech, prevarication, and charisma. This process of gaining support from the ruled majority is accomplished with the utmost care to avoid losing the ruler’s legitimacy. Machiavelli characterizes the “need to maintain the support of legislators, party workers, and voters, all of whom are in a sense mercenaries because their support must be secured by promises of action in their favor and maintained by the delivery of at least some of these promised benefits.”
It is amazing how the anachronistic teachings of an ambitious mind had survived through the years breathing new life into the world where the spring of democracy once gave light to the weak and the ruled. Today, many formidable leaders have camouflaged themselves as protectors of their people. They have remained in power with the price of freedom, justice, and morality, while on numerous occasions, their ultimate dominance has been reflected through mass atrocity.
The reelection of Saddam Hussein caused probing criticisms in the international arena of protagonists of the Anti-Saddam camps. However, the reported 100% voter turnout clearly proved that the people of Iraq regard their leader as a “savior from heaven”. The one who will alleviate the country from the pandemonium brought upon, arguably, by the invasion of Western civilization. The most striking idiocy to the people outside Iraq, especially to those who do not share the Iraqi people’s culture, is not their getting on Hussein's bandwagon, but their ignorance and tolerance of their experiences and history.
The Iraqi Kurds to the North and the Shiites to the South along the frontiers of Iran, among others had witnessed the atrocities and murderous discrimination taken against them by none other than the great leader himself. Saddam had incarcerated thousands of his people who showed death-defying courage in their outcry of discontent toward the government.
In “Splendor and Ruin: The Tale of Two Baghdads” which came out of the New York Times in January 1998, Barbara Crossette describes how buildings in Baghdad convey engravings “hailing Saddam as a new Al Mansur, the Caliph who founded Baghdad in the eighth century.” He is also portrayed as equal to Nebuchadnezzar, “one of the greatest of ancient Babylonians, ruled in the sixth century B.C.” Crossette explains why Saddam seems to be gaining a towering strength over his people despite the consequential misery brought upon by the oil embargo and other economic sanctions imposed by the UN.
Saddam’s popularity among his people, ironically, is contradicted by the wretchedness of the country’s social and economic conditions. Crossette argues that the middle class “might have formed a political opposition” if this hope had not been destroyed by the economic breakdown in the country. “An Iraqi professional now earns a base pay of 3,000 dinars a month, or about $2 at the unofficial exchange rate, for government work, which includes hospitals and universities,” Crossette adds.
“We have two big rivers. We have oil. It should not be like this, “ movingly declared by Dr. Dhia Obaidi, a pediatrician at the Saddam Central Children’s Hospital. The sentiments of his fellowmen are not loud enough to be heard by the president. Saddam still defies the Security Council by spurning its disarmament resolutions and harboring weapons of mass destruction. The recent news on Hussein’s reelection and his pardoning of prisoners, political and criminal alike, have been instrumental to the vanishing of hope for the people of this poverty-ridden land. But a sizable number of protests in the streets of Baghdad have not stopped the people of Iraq from crying the religious encomium for their aging, yet hawkish, leader. On October 15, the one-candidate Presidential election day in Iraq, Newsweek reported that 11,445,638 (100%) voters struck “yes” and some bloodied their fingers with pins to mark the YES box for seven more years of Saddam Hussein. Have the people of Iraq gone totally non compos mentis or are they just a race of dupable cowards?
Neither is true. The Iraqis are not insane nor are they cowards. The Iraqis cannot shoulder the blame because as victims of poverty and threats by a strong military backing Saddam Hussein, all they can do is to join their leader, or else, suffer his wrath.
Nevertheless, Saddam does not stand alone from the ranks of Muslim despots who have restored power in a national referendum. Pervez Musharraf gathered 98% of the vote in the most recent election in Pakistan, as did Bashar Assad of Syria with 97.9%, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt with 94% and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia with 99% of voters’ support.
Do dictatorships and authoritarian regimes pose as the sole threat to peace and development? Can we blame the hypocrisy of a voter who casts his vote under scrutiny by a vast network of pro-government security agencies? It is a mistaken belief to make culprits out of these people who merely serve the menacing power of their rulers. Furthermore, it is another deplorable mistake to see the Muslim dictators as the only villains of society capable of disregarding the welfare of their own people.
The seemingly free world of the West has its own share of bumptious Machiavellian princes. Although the intensity of barbarism and tyranny is far subservient to its eastern counterparts, many Western leaders have enjoyed governance with power encompassingly devastating, if exploited, to a plethora of vulnerable men.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” In “Two Cheers for Clinton’s Foreign Policy” published by Foreign Affairs in 2000, Stephen Walt describes the Clinton strategies of dodging bullets fired by the administration’s opponents for his poor job of providing impressive foreign policy and moral leadership for the country. This singular line was widely used during and after the Clinton years to exonerate the President from his failures in honest and irreproachable leadership.
Myriads of public opinion polls showed that confidence in Clinton remained high despite his problems on the moral front. Sindlinger and Company’s polling proclaimed that President Clinton had a 64.8% positive popularity rating right after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. This was plausibly due to the 2,351,000 new jobs that were added to the US economy. “Rising income and a strong stock market” had a hand in forging an apathetic American population at the dawn of the White House scam.
However, one must not turn a deaf ear to the fact that the economic fixation of the Clinton administration reciprocated a disaster in and out of the US. “The US Senate’s failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in October 1999” has greatly humiliated the President and his followers, wrote Sebastian Mallaby in his essay, “The Bullied Pulpit,” Foreign Affairs, 2000. Many political gurus condemn Clinton’s lethargy “to use force against states like Yugoslavia or Iraq” and his “failure to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, his tardy response to the bloodletting in the Balkans, and his abandonment of his early pledge to build a multilateral world order grounded in stronger international institutions,” Stephen Walt continued in “Two Cheers For Clinton’s Foreign Policy.” The mightiest protector of democracy in the world had failed to save the lives of thousands of people, and an egocentric prince had repudiated the one big step toward the attainment of peace once more.
Recently, we have been faced with another Machiavellian prince. He is the descendant of another wily prince who had been tarnished by his miscarried foreign policy which also resulted in his demotion from presidency. Daddy BUSH! Need I say more about Junior Bush?
Machiavelli explains that princes who gain control with the patronage of the people can easily satisfy the goodwill of the people because all they desired is freedom from the enemy’s oppression. Unfortunately being chosen by one group almost invariably costs him the good will of the other. On that note, he can never be secure against a hostile populace, but at the worst, the people will abandon their leader. The present princes of different nations succumb to illusions of power and they would do anything to preserve that power. However, the enemies are the people and the nations that attempt to protect the rights of the ruled to freedom from injustice and harm. The people who do not support the prince can only be eulogized for seeing beyond the duplicity of their leader and deposing him from his throne.
The present scenario of leadership displays not only how Machiavelli had captured the cruel nature of the lords of his time but his prophecies of an undying suppression of the people remain ineffaceable in the history of government and disturbingly, might behold the end of man.
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