Presidential candidates are finding an oddly-timed nostalgia for ruthless autocrats. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) criticized the White House’s position on the Syrian civil war during last week’s debate, arguing that deposing the Assad regime would see Syria follow the chaotic aftermath of Libya’s Ghaddafi, Iraq’s Hussein, and Egypt’s Mubarak.
Republicans aren’t the only ones with this belief, as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) showed Sunday on Meet the Press.
Host Chuck Todd asked Sanders if the Middle East would be “more stable today with Saddam, Ghaddafi and Assad, all sort of strong men in charge? “
Sanders responded that “all three of those guys are terrible dictators and the goal is through a Democratic process to get rid of terrible dictators,” but “yes, the region would be much more stable. The point here is that it is easy for a major power like the United States to get rid of somebody like Saddam Hussein, but the reason I opposed the war in Iraq is I worried very much about the destabilization in the region and what would happen the day after.”
The precarious sentiment that the Middle East would be a more stable place with dictators in charge is also one trotted out by the supporters of these autocrats. But the notion also treats regime-change and stability as a dichotomy. Few politicians seem to remember that the country where the Middle Eastern revolutions began was Tunisia. The political transition process is still inching forward, four years after deposing Ben Ali.
In other countries like Egypt, the situation today may be worse than ever before, but analysts believe that’s largely due to steps taken after the deposition of Mubarak, as well as years of political oppression that left many Egyptians unaware that democracy takes time and isn’t simply a quick fix. Cruz’s recent assertion that the U.S. deposed of Mubarak, was actually demanded by the Egyptian people and the only American involvement was to drop support for Mubarak when it looked inevitable that he’d be unable to maintain power.
The invasion of Iraq can be criticized for a multitude of reasons. It’s not difficult to find Iraqis who believe life in Baghdad and around the country was better under Saddam Hussein’s reign. But few in the Kurdish or majority Shia community will shed a tear for the man who coordinated the Halabja Massacre that killed between three and five thousand people and injured thousands more.
There is an argument to be made that Iraq could be more stable today if Hussein were still in power, but it is a fruitless exercise. Before the uprising in Syria, many experts predicted that Damascus would go untouched by what many call the Arab Spring. It’s nigh-impossible to predict what Iraq would look like under Hussein today and what the reaction of locals would have been following the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
There are a few countries though where we can see what the situation would be like if such dictators were still in charge. Indeed, politicians like Sanders should note that in Syria, Bashar al-Assad is still in charge, even though his only reign over parts of the country are expressed through barrel bombs. ISIS takes the headlines, but Assad’s regime kills far more civilians in Syria. A recent poll that interviewed 900 Syrian refugees in Europe shows that 69.5 percent blame Assad for the armed conflict, while only 31.6 perfect blame ISIS.
“Before there was Jabhat al-Nusra, there were defectors who refused to fire on innocent civilians. Before 100,000 people died, 500,000 gathered in Hama’s al-Assi Square for a nonviolent protest,” Syrian medical student and writer Omar Ghabra wrote in the Nation, in 2013. “Before there was a civil war and before Syria became the world’s chessboard, there was a peaceful uprising for freedom and dignity. It was Assad who chose to torture, murder and carpet-bomb his way to the sectarian abyss in which Syria now finds itself. It was Assad who knowingly stoked historical tensions to cement the perception that dictatorship was the only way to defend Syria from medieval radicals who will drive out the country’s vulnerable minorities.”
The current state of countries like Iraq, Syria, and Libya has been influenced by foreign involvement and regime change, there is no denying that. But even more constructive in the current chaos is a surviving legacy of political repression and brutal torture. Sanders, Cruz, Paul and the like may be using the premise of stability to argue that the Middle East would be better off under such dictators. Yet under such despots, security is fleeting and chaos follows closely.