How to Deal With Tyrants

...In such situations, then, those seeking to depose the tyrant should shift the focus of their attention from the tyrant to his subordinates, and work on deterring them...

...How does this affect a strategy of deterrence...

...Such criminals are affected by punishments and rewards meted out in the short term, and are said to have a short-term view of the future...

...How should deterrent threats be made when they are communicated in person...

...The United States is the military hegemon of the world, but even the United States has finite resources...

...A tyrant is one who rules by means of fear...

...Tyrants rule by means of fear, and are at war with their own people, as was explicitly the case in the wars waged by Stalin and Mao against the peasantry of their countries, and as is implicitly the case of the contemporary tyrannies that are starving the people of North Korea and Iraq...

...Such men have great confidence in their ability to sense whether a person talking to them is telling the truth or bluffing...

...It takes months to obtain agreement in the international community to a set of economic sanctions...

...When sending deterrent threats, therefore, we must take care not only to deliver the correct words, but also to send a messenger who communicates by his non-verbal bearing and attitude that the threat of hostile action is very real...

...This has major implications for deterrence...

...Tyrants who rule in accord with their personal will are not legitimate in the eyes of their own people...

...Xenophon, again, captured the essence of the tyrant's condition when he had the tyrant say, "To fear the crowd, yet to fear solitude...

...But it is idle to hope that the problem of his regime and his weapons of mass destruction will fade away...

...The special character of tyrannies springs from their oppression of their own people...

...In general, tyrants are able to rise to power and stay in power because they have extraordinary ability to sense the nonverbal signals that people send in face-to-face settings, and to detect when they are lying...

...They take what they want, and so they are hated...

...Care must be taken to present information and threats directly to the tyrant, either by delivering them in person, or by making the military threat to the tyrant immediately visible to the tyrant, by demonstrating it, for example, in an area where he will be sure to see it himself...

...They must be made aware, publicly, that after the defeat and death of the tyrant, they will be captured and punished if they carry out certain orders issued by the tyrant...

...He may have very stable long-term goals...

...to fear being without a guard, and to fear the very men who are guarding...

...The tyrant has nothing more to lose, but they do...

...Some people seem to be very shortsighted, lacking the ability or willingness to think more than a few hours or days into the future...

...Deterring tyrants requires more than the ability to threaten prompt retaliation, however...

...Such men are not crazy, but they do not behave the way, say, Tony Blair would, if Blair ruled their countries...

...In order to affect the decisions of tyrants, it is necessary to consider what information they have about the world...

...One has the feeling that when selecting diplomats to send to tyrannies, the State Department may not always be sensitive to this issue...

...It may take months to assemble an international coalition before military preparations and deployments can begin...

...Action to remove his government is a prerequisite to the emergence of an acceptable order in the region from Turkey to Pakistan...

...What kind of information will he receive from his subordinates...

...Ancient political philosophers, however, would have no problem recognizing a man like Saddam Hussein as a tyrant, one who rules in accord with his own will, and against the laws...

...But such a ruler will choose courses of actions that give rewards and avoid punishment in the short term...

...The existence of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons is a real problem in executing such a strategy, but the problem can be managed if the United States takes into account the special character of tyrannies...

...They are usually more intelligent than criminals, though not always...

...Hitler's ability to "read" people and then to act and talk in ways that appealed to them was legendary...

...Normally, they would fear him more than they would fear an outside power, but not when the tyranny is crumbling...

...government, it was noted that Saddam Hussein went to a great deal of trouble to arrange face-to-face meetings with his military commanders, rather than dealing with them on paper or on the telephone...

...As more lieutenants are killed, many more will defect out of fear for their personal safety...

...During the early Cold War, the United States emphasized "instant" as well as massive retaliation...

...The successful completion of the campaign in Afghanistan, and perhaps in other lawless countries that offer sanctuary to al Qaeda, may require that we bide our time, militarily, with Iraq...

...Do they not see that eventually their actions will catch up with them...

...What information do they receive, believe, and use...

...In a state where everyone lives in fear of the ruler, and where the bearers of bad news are not kindly received, there will be much information that is slow reaching the ears of the tyrant...

...Mao was not told of the defeat of his armies in Korea, or about the failures of the Great Leap Forward...

...People who study common criminals are often struck by the fact that criminals are not crazy or irrational—they act purposefully, and their actions have a logic to them—but they often seem to pay no attention to the long-term consequences of their actions...

...It may then take additional months for men and supplies to be sent to the area in which they will fight...

...Public efforts to suborn his servants will feed that frenzy...

...Deterrence always requires that threats be carried out if hostile action is taken and, by the same token, that punishment not be inflicted if hostile action is not taken...

...And what of Saddam...

...He will not be willing to think a great deal about courses of action that may be good or bad for him months or years into the future...

...The presence of U.S...

...The business of deterrence, therefore, involves making people think in certain ways about the future...

...In the studies of the 1991 Gulf War done by the U.S...

...The tyrant will, of course, increase his efforts to purge traitors, real or imagined...

...An outside power seeking the tyrant's demise must be willing to offer defectors some form of safe haven, as well as to promise punishment for die-hards...

...In ordinary conversations, we often ask ourselves why people act foolishly...

...Beyond deterrence, the United States has waged wars to depose tyrants such as Hitler and Mullah Omar...

...When a ruler must think every day about how to avoid a coup or assassination, he is likely to have a very short-term view of the future...

...At other times we have been compelled to destroy their regimes...

...Xeno-phon in his dialogue on tyranny has the tyrant say, "I believe myself that to take from an unwilling enemy is the most pleasant of all things...

...Even Hitler, who was undoubtedly loved by many Germans, was the object of several assassination attempts...

...This is more than an idle question as the governStephen Peter Rosen is the Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard...

...In either case, an effective strategy for dealing with tyrants has to take into account their special nature...

...What about tyrants...

...A ruler who is concentrating on the near term will not be much affected by threats that take months or years to execute...

...also, that Hitler's order to destroy Paris was disobeyed...

...Tyrants do not necessarily know everything that we assume well-informed people know...

...Military action that is slow to execute has the same drawbacks...

...scientists and government officials are comfortable...

...Deterrence involves communicating a threat that pain will be inflicted on someone else in the future, if certain actions are carried out...

...It is worth noting that German chemical weapons were not used against the Allied armies marching into Germany, even while Berlin was under siege...

...Is it likely that the servants of a tyrant will present him with information that shows that he has made a mistake, or has chosen a bad policy...

...Those who would deter tyrants, therefore, must not assume that threatening messages passed to his subordinates will get through to the leader in the intended form...

...Tyrants have chosen domestic strategies that promised results quickly, such as Mao's Great Leap Forward, whatever their other problems might have been...

...Democratic politicians usually think at least as far into the future as the next election...

...He will concentrate on what will be good or bad for him today, and for the next few days, because if he does not survive in the short term, nothing else will matter...

...In time, we should destroy him...

...they prefer more neutral formulations, such as "unitary rational actor" or "state of concern...

...Meanwhile, Saddam must be deterred from overt hostile action...

...Every day Hitler woke up, he wanted to kill the Jews...

...A tyrant is like a politician who faces reelection every day and will be executed if he loses...

...to be unwilling to have unarmed men about me, yet not gladly to see them armed—how could this fail to be a painful condition...

...On the other hand, if the military capability to inflict pain is visibly in place and can be used rapidly in response to a hostile act, this will affect the calculations of even a very shortsighted tyrant...

...Deterrence will fail against tyrants when retaliation is slow...

...By contrast, they do not commit crimes if a policeman is standing next to them or just around the corner...

...For now, we must deter him...

...What does a strategy of tyrannicide call for...

...If a tyrant has access to weapons of mass destruction, and fears that foreign military action may bring him down, what, if anything, can prevent him from launching his weapons in the belief that he has nothing to lose and might as well kill as many of his adversaries as possible...

...Economic sanctions, once in place, take years to affect the country against which they are directed...

...It is striking that the tyrants we know about were all good at reading the body language of the people with whom they came into contact, and were sensitive to their tone of voice...

...All tyrants have spies and secret police forces to protect themselves from their enemies, but, more important, to protect them from their own generals and family...

...This will increase the rate at which the tyranny crumbles...

...ment of the United States turns its attention to Saddam Hussein...

...If it is obvious even to the tyrant that he is facing defeat, it will be equally apparent to his subordinates...

...Tyranny is not a word I with which modern political .^L...

...The consequence is that tyrants live in constant fear of being killed...

...We now have documents, for example, revealing that Hitler's foreign minister did not pass on to the Führer crucial intelligence about the French before the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, because he feared he might be punished if the intelligence proved to be wrong...

...Do all people look at the future in the same way...

...forces in South Korea and the Persian Gulf today serves that purpose...

...No one strategy will always be appropriate for dealing with tyrannies...

...We now know that Stalin was not told during his 1948 blockade of Berlin that the American airlift was successfully resupplying that city, and he continued the blockade in the belief that it was working...

...Under some circumstances, as with Joseph Stalin, we have been content to deter tyrants from hostile action...

...What, then, are the special problems of tyrannicide under modern conditions, when tyrants seek and, increasingly, obtain, weapons of mass destruction...

...In fact, they are likely to know it long before the tyrant accepts the reality of his situation...

...They do, however, invariably live in conditions that require them to be suspicious of everyone around them...