HOW SHOULD we deal with tyrants who threaten the security of the United States and its friends? Tyranny is not a word with which modern political scientists and government officials are comfortable; they prefer more neutral formulations, such as “unitary rational actor” or “state of concern.” 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. Such men are not crazy, but they do not behave the way, say, Tony Blair would, if Blair ruled their countries. No one strategy will always be appropriate for dealing with tyrannies. Under some circumstances, as with Joseph Stalin, we have been content to deter tyrants from hostile action. At other times we have been compelled to destroy their regimes. In either case, an effective strategy for dealing with tyrants has to take into account their special nature. This is more than an idle question as the government of the United States turns its attention to Saddam Hussein. For now, we must deter him. In time, we should destroy him. What, then, are the special problems of tyrannicide under modern conditions, when tyrants seek and, increasingly, obtain, weapons of mass destruction? The special character of tyrannies springs from their oppression of their own people. Tyrants who rule in accord with their personal will are not legitimate in the eyes of their own people. They take what they want, and so they are hated. Xenophon 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.” 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. The consequence is that tyrants live in constant fear of being killed. Even Hitler, who was undoubtedly loved by many Germans, was the object of several assassination attempts. Xenophon, again, captured the essence of the tyrant’s condition when he had the tyrant say, “To fear the crowd, yet to fear solitude; to fear being without a guard, and to fear the very men who are guarding; 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?” 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. HOW DOES this affect a strategy of deterrence? Deterrence involves communicating a threat that pain will be inflicted on someone else in the future, if certain actions are carried out. The business of deterrence, therefore, involves making people think in certain ways about the future. Do all people look at the future in the same way? In ordinary conversations, we often ask ourselves why people act foolishly. Do they not see that eventually their actions will catch up with them? Some people seem to be very shortsighted, lacking the ability or willingness to think more than a few hours or days into the future. 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. By contrast, they do not commit crimes if a policeman is standing next to them or just around the corner. 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. What about tyrants? They are usually more intelligent than criminals, though not always. They do, however, invariably live in conditions that require them to be suspicious of everyone around them. 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. He may have very stable long-term goals. Every day Hitler woke up, he wanted to kill the Jews. But such a ruler will choose courses of actions that give rewards and avoid punishment in the short term. 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. 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. Democratic politicians usually think at least as far into the future as the next election. A tyrant is like a politician who faces reelection every day and will be executed if he loses. Tyrants have chosen domestic strategies that promised results quickly, such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward, whatever their other problems might have been. This has major implications for deterrence. A ruler who is concentrating on the near term will not be much affected by threats that take months or years to execute. It takes months to obtain agreement in the international community to a set of economic sanctions. Economic sanctions, once in place, take years to affect the country against which they are directed. Military action that is slow to execute has the same drawbacks. It may take months to assemble an international coalition before military preparations and deployments can begin. It may then take additional months for men and supplies to be sent to the area in which they will fight. Deterrence will fail against tyrants when retaliation is slow. 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. The presence of U.S. forces in South Korea and the Persian Gulf today serves that purpose. During the early Cold War, the United States emphasized “instant” as well as massive retaliation. DETERRING TYRANTS requires more than the ability to threaten prompt retaliation, however. In order to affect the decisions of tyrants, it is necessary to consider what information they have about the world. What information do they receive, believe, and use? Tyrants do not necessarily know everything that we assume well-informed people know. A tyrant is one who rules by means of fear. What kind of information will he receive from his subordinates? 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? 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. We now have documents, for example, revealing that Hitler’s foreign minister did not pass on to the Fuehrer 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. 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. Mao was not told of the defeat of his armies in Korea, or about the failures of the Great Leap Forward. 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. 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. How should deterrent threats be made when they are communicated in person? 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. In genera
l, 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. Hitler’s ability to “read” people and then to act and talk in ways that appealed to them was legendary. In the studies of the 1991 Gulf War done by the U.S. 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. Such men have great confidence in their ability to sense whether a person talking to them is telling the truth or bluffing. 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. One has the feeling that when selecting diplomats to send to tyrannies, the State Department may not always be sensitive to this issue. BEYOND DETERRENCE, the United States has waged wars to depose tyrants such as Hitler and Mullah Omar. 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? It is worth noting that German chemical weapons were not used against the Allied armies marching into Germany, even while Berlin was under siege; also, that Hitler’s order to destroy Paris was disobeyed. If it is obvious even to the tyrant that he is facing defeat, it will be equally apparent to his subordinates. In fact, they are likely to know it long before the tyrant accepts the reality of his situation. 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. The tyrant has nothing more to lose, but they do. 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. Normally, they would fear him more than they would fear an outside power, but not when the tyranny is crumbling. The tyrant will, of course, increase his efforts to purge traitors, real or imagined. Public efforts to suborn his servants will feed that frenzy. This will increase the rate at which the tyranny crumbles. As more lieutenants are killed, many more will defect out of fear for their personal safety. 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. 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? The United States is the military hegemon of the world, but even the United States has finite resources. 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. Meanwhile, Saddam must be deterred from overt hostile action. But it is idle to hope that the problem of his regime and his weapons of mass destruction will fade away. Action to remove his government is a prerequisite to the emergence of an acceptable order in the region from Turkey to Pakistan. 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. Stephen Peter Rosen is the Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard.
