How to respond to tyrants?

This hasn't been a good year for tyranny, especially in the Middle East, where so much of it is concentrated. Just how welcome a development that is remains to be seen.

To be sure, tyrants have their downside. They don't tolerate much backtalk, and they can be quite unpleasant when crossed. Their subjects must put up with an excess of statues to the Leader and casual abuse by his cronies. State television is dull. Poverty tends to be endemic, and life expectancy is typically low.

On the other hand, political candidates don't solicit your money and your vote to trade their favors to giant corporations while roads and bridges rot out from under you. Faceless do-gooders don't shove petitions for baby harp seals and political prisoners in Uganda under your nose every time you open your e-mail. (If you're lucky enough, you don't have e-mail.)

Tyrants are said to fear democracies, although I sometimes wonder whether it isn't the other way around. Every democracy established in the wake of World War I (Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world "safe for democracy") had been replaced by dictatorships within 20 years.

The U.S. has a remarkable record of friendship with tyrants, at least the ones that give us basing rights and access to cheap labor and fossil fuels. On the other hand, we've undermined or overthrown democracies whose policies displeased us— Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973.

Mubarak: Front man for the military

Hosni Mubarak was not a tyrant in the classical sense but the front man for a military establishment that has ruled Egypt since 1952. The U.S. has subsidized this establishment to the tune of $1.5 billion per annum since the Camp David accords of 1978, primarily for the purpose of inducing it not to wage war on Israel and to repress Islamic fundamentalism. It's the world's only army paid not to fight.

As the military's front man for 30 years, Mubarak kept the cold peace with Israel. On the international stage, he was accounted a statesman.

That most Egyptians lived in grinding poverty; that the military monopolized most of the civilian economy; that civil society as such was virtually nonexistent— this was simply, from Washington's point of view, a cost of doing business, if that. Occasionally, Mubarak was very gently chided about his human rights abuses, even as he discreetly obliged us on torture renditions. Essentially, we hoped he'd live to a hundred.

It was not to be. The Arab Spring caught everyone off guard— well, how does one prepare for a spontaneous insurrection that arcs across two continents?— and Mubarak found himself a fall guy. General Mubarak, who had become President Mubarak, was now to become Citizen Mubarak, which is to say he has wound up on trial in a cage.

Qaddafi: On the Pentagon's to-do list

Moammar Qaddafi may be regarded as the collateral damage of the Egyptian Revolution. The Obama administration had been embarrassed by demands from Egyptian insurgents that he embrace their calls for democratization, which he had publicly embraced in his June 2009 speech at Cairo University. While vaguely supporting "change" (sound familiar?) Obama had pointedly refrained from any undue criticism of Mubarak's brutal response to street protests.

But the Egyptian revolt, as well as the tepid American response to the insurrections in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, left the U.S. with a credibility deficit in the Arab street. When events in Egypt triggered a tribal uprising in neighboring Libya, U.S. policymakers saw an opportunity to support "freedom" on the cheap. Qaddafi was no ally, but a rogue elephant who, although recently corralled, remained on the Pentagon's to-do list for the Berlin nightclub and Lockerbie airline bombings of the 1980s.

Undeclared war

Unlike Mubarak, Qaddafi had no military peers to answer to; also unlike Mubarak, he faced an armed uprising that gave him ample justification for a military response. He was just finishing business when, on the pretext of avoiding a massacre in the rebels' stronghold of Benghazi, Obama cooked up a Kosovo-style bombing campaign under the fig leaf of NATO.

In effect, we declared war on a non-belligerent state with which we enjoyed full diplomatic relations, in violation of international treaties to which we were a party— except that there was no declaration, and Obama denied to Congress that there was any war.

That war may well continue, or morph into a bloody struggle as elements of Libya's fractious rebel alliance jostle for power. The one clear certainty is that democracy won't result in a country without political parties or civil institutions. Somalia is the model to watch, with Al Qaeda (which has links to Libyan rebel leaders) preying opportunistically on the ruins of a failed state.

Assad and the dreaded "'L' word

The third tyrant in our tale is Bashir al-Assad of Syria, currently battling a broad-based if fragmented insurgency against his clan's 40-year rule. Assad's crackdown on unarmed protesters has been particularly violent— some 2,200 have been killed so far— but, until recently, without drawing any response from the international community, save toothless sanctions.

In Syria's case, America's response has been particularly muted. Not until Saudi Arabia (which itself had crushed popular protests in Bahrain) denounced Assad did Obama pronounce the dreaded "L" word and opine that Assad, like Qaddafi, had lost his legitimacy. But Obama has taken no further action, in part because the Syrian insurgents have reportedly declined military assistance, no doubt from having observed American-style liberation at work in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Right of intervention?

I don't fault Obama for hanging back on Syria. Interstate relations, at least among sovereign equals, have been governed since 1648 by the Westphalian principle, according to which states don't intervene in each other's internal affairs. This principle has been partially modified since 1945 to allow a qualified right of intervention when disturbance in one state affects the security of its neighbors (as Turkey recently put Syria on notice).

There are good reasons, in an imperfect world, to respect the Westphalian principle. Obama not only violated it in the case of Libya, he launched a war of aggression with a genocidal weapon: aerial bombardment. For the suppositional hundreds or thousands who might have perished in Benghazi at Qaddafi's hands, he has all but guaranteed a far larger long-term loss of life throughout that country.