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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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Hussein Macarambon
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