Dictators do not usually die in bed. Successful retirement is always a problem for them, and few solve it. It is a problem for everybody else when they leave. What's to be done afterwards?
The popular uprising that overturned the dictatorial Zine el-
Except for the complex case of
The deposed president Ben Ali spent the first part of his career as a promising young army officer. His career led into intelligence and security, always a highway to success in the contemporary Arab world. He attended courses at Saint-Cyr in
Ben Ali's economic and educational reforms produced the best educated and most prosperous of the Maghreb states, with, as the result, an underemployed intellectual class and a frustrated middle class, both contributing to his downfall. His wife, a nouvelle-riche ex-hairdresser, and her immediate family were generally credited, during the Ben Ali presidency, with a rapacious personal enrichment that contributed massively to the ruling family's popular repudiation. It is a familiar story, with parallels in the business and banking elites of western countries, where enrichment is also prized, but political elites and their wives are usually more prudent.
At this writing, efforts to construct a transitional Tunisian government are going badly, since, having rid themselves of Ben Ali, the public seems unwilling to see him replaced either by former associates or figures from an opposition that mostly has existed in exile.
This, classically, is where a would-be Napoleon steps in, and the army in
And what about Laurent Gbagbo in the
He still controls the seat of government in
But if the U.N. were to go about installing leaders by force in various countries, no matter how just the cause, there would be hell to pay elsewhere, including in
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