Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
This 'hard man' line gets trotted out regularly and rather ignores the fact that these sort of quasi-socialist, kleptocratic, 'hard-man' dictators like Mubarak and Assad are actually shït at running their countries. They give the appearance of keeping the lid on, but actually balls things up to the extent of them becoming backwards, rat poor and basically forming a wonderful breeding ground for resentful hard-line islamists.
Oh I don't know - Saddam had a pretty good control of Iraq, the problem with Mubarak and Assad was that they weren't hard enough. Saudi is effectively a dictatorship but given that they based their entire society around Wahhabism it's hardly surprising that they've exported loads of mental Allans. Would we have been better off in many of these countries if we had picked a brutal dictator type and said 'do what you want to your people, provided you stop exporting terrorism we'll give you all the money and arms that you need to keep power'? Possibly.

And if dictators aren't the answer and these people will simply never accept democracy, I'm not too sure what the answer is.

There is also an argument that you leave the entire region to become what it will become and then deal with whoever emerges. If ISIS had been successful in completing their caliphate complete with oil revenues to keep them going, would they have turned down the West's offer of peace provided they kept themselves to themselves? Especially if the alternative was that we bombed their oil production and themselves out of existence? Personally, I doubt it.