The Dictator's Handbook (40 page)

The conduct of the First Gulf War also fits the patterns predicted by a political survival outlook. The United States first tried negotiations
to get Iraqi forces to leave. When these failed, the United States assembled an overwhelmingly powerful coalition of highly trained and superbly equipped troops. Saddam Hussein had elite troops, such as the Republican Guard, that perhaps came close to matching the training and capability of coalition forces. But his elite Republican Guard did not confront the coalition forces; Saddam had them pulled back to safety so they could protect him rather than protect Iraq. Instead the brunt of the coalition attack was borne by raw recruits and poorly equipped units. As the casualty figures show, many of these units suffered horribly.

Facing the possibility that coalition forces would invade Baghdad to depose him, on February 28 Saddam Hussein agreed to terms of surrender. The United States retained forces in the Gulf to ensure Saddam complied with the terms to which he had agreed. Yet no-fly exclusion zones, diplomatic isolation, and economic sanctions did not stop Saddam from repeatedly reneging on the agreement he accepted. He also survived domestically. After his military defeat, several groups, including Shiites in the South and Kurds in the North, rebelled. Unfortunately for them, Saddam had preserved his best troops and retained enough resources to buy their continued loyalty. The suppression of these uprisings killed tens of thousands and led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others. Saddam would subsequently remain in power until the United States deposed him in the Second Gulf War in 2003.

Saddam was not alone in placing survival and enrichment over fighting well. Dictators would like to win wars if they can secure control over extra riches that way, but keeping their job takes priority over pursuing those riches. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who came to power in 1974 when he overthrew Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, embraced communism and was handsomely rewarded by the Soviet Union. Over a fourteen-year period the USSR gave his regime about $9 billion, much of it as military aid with which to fight Eritrean rebel forces seeking independence. Despite all this money, his war against the Eritreans did not go well. It seems Mengistu was more interested in the Soviet money as a means to enrich himself and ensure his political survival than in the successful conduct of the war. He
certainly had little concern for his soldiers' welfare, as we shall see later. Michela Wrong, for instance, reports that the Soviets eventually worked out that Mengistu's devotion to the fight was not all it was cracked up to be: “‘He kept telling us that if we helped him he could achieve this military victory,' remembers Adamishin, with bitterness. ‘I remember how he told me with tears in his eyes: “We may have to sell our last shirt, but we will pay you back. We Ethiopians are a proud people, we settle our debts.” Looking back, I almost feel I hate him. Because I believed that what mattered to him was what was best for the country. While really all that mattered to him was his own survival.'”
¹⁰

Unfortunately for Mengistu Haile Miriam, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of his gravy train. In 1989 the Soviets departed. Mengistu needed a new source of money. In an effort to salvage his situation, he decided to try to get blood money from the United States and Israel by offering to trade Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) for money and military aid. The Falashas dated back in North Africa for thousands of years and are counted among those who fled from the Babylonian captivity in 586 BCE. To resettle these people, the United States allegedly paid $20 million and Israel agreed to pay $58 million (but eventually only paid $35 million). With the money transferred, the rescued Falashas were then settled in Israel.
¹¹
This blood money was not enough to buy the loyalty of his supporters. It was a far cry from the annual amounts doled out by the Soviets. As his military collapsed to the much weaker Eritrean forces, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he lives in luxury with around fifty former colleagues and family members.

Democrats are much more sensitive to war outcomes than autocrats.
¹²
Indeed, even victory in war does not guarantee a democrat's political survival. For instance, within eighteen months of defeating Saddam Hussein, and the over 80 percent approval ratings that went with it, President George Herbert Walker Bush was defeated at the polls by Bill Clinton in 1992. Similarly, British voters threw Winston Churchill out of office despite his inspired leadership during World War II. Still,
while it is no guarantee of political survival, military victory clearly helps. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher turned her career around with the defeat of Argentina in the Falklands war in 1982. Her economic reforms and confrontations with trade unions had led to recession and high unemployment. Prior to the war she was deeply unpopular. At the end of 1981 her approval rating stood at 25 percent. After the war this jumped to over 50 percent, and a year later she won a decisive electoral victory that would have looked virtually impossible eighteen months earlier.

Military success helps democrats retain power while defeat makes removal a near certainty for democrats. A failure to achieve victory in Vietnam ended US president Johnson's career. French premier Joseph Laniel suffered a similar fate. His government collapsed following the French defeat by Vietnamese forces in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. British prime minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign after his disastrous invasion of Egypt's Suez Canal Zone in 1956.

Autocrats are much less sensitive to defeat. Despite defeat in the First Gulf War and a costly and inconclusive result in the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), Saddam Hussein outlasted four US presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton). Only defeat in the Second Gulf War cost him his job, and that war was fought primarily to remove him. Unless they are defeated by a democracy seeking policy concessions, autocrats can generally survive military defeat provided that they preserve their resources. Autocrats even survive if their loss involves huge causalities. In contrast, even in victory democrats are liable to be deposed if they get lots of soldiers killed in the process. That presumably is why democrats do much more to protect soldiers than autocrats do.

Hermann Goring, Hitler's number two in the Nazi German regime, knew that, while it is the people who do the fighting, it is leaders who start wars.

Goring is right. Leaders of every flavor can deploy troops and the people in democracies are liable to rally around the flag. But democrats don't recklessly put soldiers in harm's way. And when they do, they do much more to protect them. The value of a soldier's life differs drastically between small- and large-coalition systems. To illustrate this sad truth we compare two conflicts fought a few years apart in the Horn of Africa.

The US military operates on the principle of no soldier left behind. For an accurate and gory drama of this principle, we recommend Ridley Scott's 2001 film,
Black Hawk Down,
which portrays an account of the battle of Mogadishu, October 3–4, 1993. US troops entered Somalia as part of a United Nations–sponsored humanitarian mission. In 1993 Somalia was a collapsed state. Between 1969 and 1991 it had been ruled by Siad Barre, someone who understood that policy should always be subordinate to survival. As the real-life Barre bluntly stated, “I believe neither in Islam, nor socialism nor tribalism, nor Somali nationalism, nor pan-Africanism. The ideology to which I am committed is the ideology of political survival.”
¹⁴
And this focus allowed him to successfully survive in office for twenty-two years before being caught up and deposed in the myriad of civil wars that plague the Horn of Africa. Following his deposition, the Somali state collapsed, with control divided between tribal warlords whose militia terrorized the people. Mohamed Farrah Aideed, who led the Habar Gidir clan, controlled one of the strongest factions. Aideed was strongly opposed to the United States's presence in Somalia because he believed the United States was backing his adversaries. After several failed attempts to capture or kill Aideed, the United States received intelligence that several of his senior colleagues were meeting at a house. The US plan was to helicopter elite troops into the building, capture the senior Habar Gidir members, and get out via a military convoy.

Unfortunately the mission went sour. Two Black Hawk helicopters went down and two others were damaged. Thousands of Somalis took to the streets and erected barricades so that the convoy became
trapped. Both the helicopter crews and many in the convoy became trapped overnight and subject to small-arms fire, and it was not until the next day that they could be rescued. Although the operation was a debacle, the US commitment to its soldiers was unwavering. As is to be expected when soldiers' lives are highly valued, the United States sent forces in to retrieve the downed helicopter crews. We might take this for granted but it is not the behavior of autocrats—the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict in the Horn of Africa provides a case in point.

The Battle of Afabet (March 17–20, 1988) was an important turning point in the decades-long battle for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia. As we have seen, Ethiopia had an enormous military of about 500,000 men that was lavishly equipped by Soviet military aid. In contrast, virtually all the Eritrean's equipment had been captured from the Ethiopians.

In a switch from its usual guerrilla tactics, the Eritrean rebel force (the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, or EPLF) decided to challenge the Ethiopian army in a head-on battle. The Ethiopians resisted solidly for sixteen hours. On multiple occasions the EPLF commander, Mesfin, was told to withdraw but he carried on pressing his attack. The Ethiopian commanders decided to withdraw to the garrison town of Afabet and assembled a convoy of seventy vehicles. Unfortunately for them, the withdrawal went through the Ad Shirum Pass that forms a natural bottleneck. When an advancing EPLF tank hit a truck in the front of the column, the Ethiopian forces were stuck.

The Ethiopian command was concerned that their heavy weapons not fall into enemy hands. Fortunately for them they had a sizable air force. Yet, rather than attempt to relieve their trapped countrymen and fellow soldiers, they embarked on a two-hour aerial bombardment that destroyed everything. The Ethiopian motto was: Leave no working tank behind. As an Ethiopian general put it, “when you lose an area you better destroy your equipment—it's a principle of war. If you cannot separate your men from their equipment then you bomb them both together.”
¹⁵

It's likely that few readers have ever heard of this battle, in which Ethiopian causalities were perhaps as high as 18,000 men. In contrast, many Americans are familiar with the disastrous policy failure in
which, for the loss of thirteen lives, the US army killed possibly as many as 1,000 Somali militants.

Democracies hardly ever (some might even say never) fight wars with each other. This is not to say they are peace loving. They are not shy about fighting other states. But the reasoning behind the tacit peace between democracies provides some clues to how the world could become more peaceful and why achieving that end is so difficult.

Democratic leaders need to deliver policy success or they will be turned out of office. For this reason they only fight wars when they expect to win. Of course they may turn out to be wrong, in which case, as we have argued, they then double down to turn the fight in their direction. That is just what happened in Vietnam, where the United States committed massive numbers of troops and huge amounts of money to no avail. Only after many long, costly years of trying did the United States settle for a negotiated peace that ultimately turned all of Vietnam over to the North Vietnamese regime.

If we are correct, we should hardly ever witness two large-coalition regimes fighting against each other. According to our reasoning, democrats will only fight when they believe they are almost certain that they will win. But how can two adversaries each sustain such certainty? Autocrats, as we saw, don't need to think they have a great chance of winning. They are prepared to take bigger risks because they have good reason to think that the personal consequences of defeat are not as bad for them as the personal consequences of not paying off their few essential supporters. Now, following the logic of political survival closely, we must recognize that just because two democrats are not likely to fight with each other, we cannot say that one will not use force against another. Large-coalition systems certainly may be prepared to engage in disputes with each other and one might even use force against the other. How does this work?

As long as a large coalition leader believes that his dispute is unlikely to escalate to war, he can move partially up the escalation ladder, pressing
his foe into backing down or else backing down himself, and negotiating if he concludes that the other side is prepared to fight and that his own prospects of victory are too small to justify fighting. Now imagine the two disputants are both democracies dependent on a large coalition. The logic of large-coalition politics tells us that a large-coalition state will attack another large-coalition state only if the target is sufficiently weak that the target is expected to prefer to negotiate rather than fight back. Since the democratic target will also try hard if it chooses to fight back, the initiating democracy must either have or be capable of having a great military advantage or it must be confident that its rival's resources are insufficient for the target to believe it can be nearly certain of victory. Thus, the attacking democracy must be sure that its target democracy is
unsure
of victory; this is of paramount importance in a head-to-head military dispute between two democracies.
¹⁶
Here we have an explanation for the history of US attacks against very weak democratic rivals such as Lyndon Johnson's 1965 attack and overthrow of Juan Bosch's democratically elected regime in the Dominican Republic, France's invasion of Weimar Germany in 1923, and the list goes on.