The twilight of the tyrants

One leader who recently failed that test was Georgia's Eduard Shevardnadze. He was forced from office last month by a peaceful uprising, after more than ten years in power, when he tried to rig parliamentary elections. Behind the scenes, US diplomats helped convince Mr. Shevardnardze to go, in line with Washington's declared policy of helping to spread democracy throughout the world, and to see off its remaining dictators.

That has by no means always been the case, as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, the Shah of Iran and Indonesia's General Suharto - all dictators installed and maintained with US assistance - well knew.

President Bush admitted, in a speech last month to the National Endowment for Democracy, to "60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East."

Those days, he promised, were over. But Berhanu Nega, for one, remains to be convinced. "Countries that claim to believe in democracy cater to dictators in the name of national security," complains Mr. Nega, who heads the Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Centre in Addis Ababa.

"That is the most unfortunate thing that is happening to Africa."

At the same time, he charges, Washington picks and chooses its targets when it comes to pressing autocrats. "If they don't like a government, such as Mugabe's, then democracy becomes the whipping instrument," says Nega. "They don't use it against governments they do like."

Such governments include Ethiopia's ruling People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, which claimed to have won 97 percent of the vote at the last elections, but has the virtue in American eyes of having offered support for the US 'war on terror,' as has Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov.

"That is one thing making Africans cynical about Western intentions," argues Nega. "You don't see any principled, consistent policy by the developed countries to push for democracy in Africa."

Mr. Palmer, the former US diplomat, who has just published the book "Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025," agrees.

"The key question is, have we actually changed? and I don't see any hard evidence beyond the rhetorical statements," he says. When the Saudi Arabian authorities arrested several hundred people protesting in Riyadh for greater political freedoms inOctober, Palmer recalls, "the State Department did nothing and said nothing."

Even critics of Western attitudes to "friendly dictators" acknowledge, though, that realpolitik is real. "You can say the US is hypocritical and motivated by its national interest, but sometimes, idiosyncratically, haphazardly, it does act altruistically," says Zakaria. "You do these things when you can, when they don't exact too much of a price."

Palmer would like to change that, to make the disposal of dictators one of the cornerstones of US foreign policy. But the role of outsiders, he insists, must primarily be to aid local people fighting their own battles to depose their despots.

"I really believe in people power supported by the outside," he says. "When that kind of power brings about change, you don't have the mess we've got in Iraq, where legitimacy [of the US-installed government] is in doubt."

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