Dartblog

Several hours into the Hussein death watch, the Associated Press moved a wire story called “Death, Exile Come With Being a Dictator.” I found that headline especially interesting. Reporter Robert H. Reid essentially gets it right when he writes, “The global record of bringing tyrants to justice has been mixed.” But that hardly deals with the mad assertion made in the headline, which is that the fall is somehow commingled with the tyranny. As though deposition is passively guaranteed with men like Hussein, Milosevic, Hitler, Pol Pot, and the rest. It seems to me that the reporters and the wire service are missing a crucial common ingredient: the causality of death and exile.

And the cause? Very rarely the dictators themselves.