Saddam Hussein dies sometime between 1992 and 2000

What would you expect to happen if saddam hussein had unexpectedly died sometime between 1992 and 2000 either through natural causes or as a result of sudden internal power struggle.
 
I'm not so sure of that. You have to remember that Saddam Hussein was a fairly typical monopolistic strong-man. Essentially, he eliminated everyone that he considered a threat to his power, which effectively meant that he eliminated his competent potential successors.

Syria and North Korea had competent coherent politburos which kept the regime propped up for a second generation replacement. But if you look at Syria's and North Korea's politburo or leadership, you find a rapidly aging generation of old men. Haiti is another example of a transfer of dictatorship, but I think that Haiti is a special case, and anyway, Babydoc didn't last.

But they're the exception rather than the rule. For most dictatorships the strongman is the entirety of the regime. Pinochet, Trujillo, Castro, Tito, Suharto, etc. When the big kahuna goes on to the anti=club med down below, the days of the regime are numbered.

His replacement would have been one of his psychotic sons - young men with no constituency and no support beyond their dads patronage. Saddam's networks of political alliances and patronage would have dissolved, the various levers of power would have run on autopilot, but not effectively.

So, Uday or Qsay take over, there's 1 to 5 years of corruption and misrule, and then people power demonstrations take over. The ghosts of the old regime gets swept away, and the Iraqi's begin their experiment with Democracty.

This isn't a leap or anything. It's happened over and over again all over eastern europe, asia and latin america.
 
I'd think that (initially) one of his sons would succeed him at least until his/their incompetence & corruption become too apparent when (probably at least a couple of years, probably 1-5 after Saddam's death) they get deposed/killed by the military heads and a powerful military man or Ba'athist party official succeeds Hussein II.
 
The lovely thing about these sorts of dictators is that they tend to eliminate their successors.

Take a look around - the rule is that when one of these guys goes down, there's no strongman that replaces him. Democracy breaks out.
 
Probably yes and I've heard the were just like him. I don't think it would change Iraq's fate.

The oldest was a bit impulsive and even more violent than the father, and the younger son was cold and calculating, and had far better control over violent tendancies. The younger would be better suited for governing, but there may well be a patricidal civil war, or at least a knife in the back in a dark room following Saddam's death.
 
The lovely thing about these sorts of dictators is that they tend to eliminate their successors.

Take a look around - the rule is that when one of these guys goes down, there's no strongman that replaces him. Democracy breaks out.

These sort of dictators? And any examples for democratization coming after one of "these sorts" of dictators gets ousted/killed/dies?
 
What sort of support could Uday and Qusay have and how much of that was dependent on Saddam being alive?

What respect did they have amongst those who gave the orders to the Divisions?
 
These sort of dictators? And any examples for democratization coming after one of "these sorts" of dictators gets ousted/killed/dies?

Spain after Franco. Trujillo in the Dominican republic. Galtieri in Argentina. Pinochet in Chile. Babydoc in Haiti (though they kept on having trouble). Suharto in Indonesia? Marcos in the Phillipines. Russia, in a sense once the post-stalinist Politburo all died off. Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bolivia, Pakistan (off and on), Lebanon, Ukraine, Turkey, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru.

Democracy, gotta love it.
 
I dont think the prospects for democracy would be too sunny in Iraq after Saddam. Sure there would be infighting and purges among the head honchos, but somebody -- probably the military brass -- would realize that a stable government is necessary and trumps any factional differences for the time being, and they'd put the clamp down on any popular agitation.

And as a response to the last post, consider China after Mao.
 
The trouble is that Saddam Hussein was very careful to make sure that no one had too much power in his country, apart from him. For instance, he basically had two parallel armies - the regular Army and the Republican Guard. Each with its own command structure and generals. His secret police unit was a third force, as were his regular police, a fourth force. Dividing his forces between four military commands ensured none of them were strong enough to overthrow him, but that means that none were strong enough to replace him when he goes. He did this everywhere with every sector, making sure no one was strong enough to challenge him or undermine him. He extended this to his very family, refusing to give either Uday or Qsay the go ahead as heir apparent - because if one was the heir apparent, that would be a challenge. He creates this giant cult of personality, Stalinist in nature, but refuses to let anyone else be a big figure.

The bottom line is that when Saddam goes, there is nobody but nobody in a position to step into his shoes. Instead, his regime is reduced to a collection of fiefdoms which can run things for a while, as long as they hold together. But he's the big Kahuna, no one else has his stature. So the regime drifts for a while, but in the end, Democracy rules.

I dunno. Before we invaded, Iraq was the most westernized society in the Arab world, very secular population, well educated, predominantly urban. They had a good chance of achieving Democracy on their own. At least as good a chance as Trujillo's Dominican Republic or Franco's Spain.

And yes, China after Mao just lead to more communist dictatorship. So what? Same thing happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Basically, Communist states differ from run of the mill dictatorships because the bureaucratize rule.

But if we look at the Soviet Union, what's interesting is how it all happened. The Post-Stalin politburo, a bunch of guys who had come up in WWII all steadily aged, and then started dying off - Brezhnev, then Gromyko, Andropov, in the end it was all sick old men. They finally aged out of power, and the guys who came after - Gorbachev and Yeltsin ushered in the end of the Soviet Empire and Russian democracy.

You go look at North Korea and Syria, you see the same thing. There's been a nominal transfer of power to the annointed sun, but its really the politburo running things and they're getting old. Assad's politburo were all associates of his dad. What's the average age of the Chinese high command? What happens when they lose their grip....
 
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Well then who would lead the democratic movement? This isn't just a critique, but an honest question -- did Iraq have anybody who could do that? Any kind of civil society which could step into the post-dictatorship vacuum?
 
Does a Democracy movement need a single heroic leader? Did the American democracy movement have that? I think instead it had a handful - Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. etc. In the Indonesian democracy movement was it a single heroic leader? Wouldn't the will of the people make the difference.

In Russia, when the military tried its reactionary coup, George Yeltsin was the guy who stood in front of a tank. But he wasn't alone out there. And if he hadn't been there, they would still have been.

In Spain, after Franco, the fascist military tried a coup to return Spain to dictatorship. Spanish parliamentarians stood up to guns and faced them down.

In Iraq after Saddam, the truth is, no one has the power to take over. Which means that what you're going to get is politics. And when politics happens, you got people trying to get the people on side. So no one really has the power to shut down the people, and if you do try, then the other factions move against you. Democracy wins.
 
Does a Democracy movement need a single heroic leader? Did the American democracy movement have that? I think instead it had a handful - Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. etc. In the Indonesian democracy movement was it a single heroic leader? Wouldn't the will of the people make the difference.

In Russia, when the military tried its reactionary coup, George Yeltsin was the guy who stood in front of a tank. But he wasn't alone out there. And if he hadn't been there, they would still have been.

In Spain, after Franco, the fascist military tried a coup to return Spain to dictatorship. Spanish parliamentarians stood up to guns and faced them down.

In Iraq after Saddam, the truth is, no one has the power to take over. Which means that what you're going to get is politics. And when politics happens, you got people trying to get the people on side. So no one really has the power to shut down the people, and if you do try, then the other factions move against you. Democracy wins.

No, what it means is that there is going to be a multi-sided civil war. Probably followed by the disintegration of Iraq. Whether or not any of the successor states are democratic is an open question.
 
No, what it means is that there is going to be a multi-sided civil war. Probably followed by the disintegration of Iraq. Whether or not any of the successor states are democratic is an open question.

Yeah, I guess those multi-sided civil wars in the Phillipines and Spain really showed the way, uh? :rolleyes:

Unlikely. Iraq was a unitary state organized along bureaucratic lines with an extremely mixed secular urbanized population. The largest Shia city? Baghdad. The largest Sunni city? Baghdad again. The largest Kurdish city? Baghdad one more time.

The truth is, the United States had to work good and hard to create the conditions of the low level civil war that Iraq has now. In a post Saddam environment of stalemate, two things we probably wouldn't see would be the rise of extremist Islamism among the Sunnis, and campaigns of ethnic cleansing by the Shia.

A multi-sided civil war is very unlikely. At best, you might see some jockeying between armed factions, maybe a coup attempt, but that's about it.

The Kurds of course are a different story, unless there's some arrangement with them, we're likely to see yet another Kurdish uprising in the post-Saddam era.

Geez, you know, I have to say you guys are such a bunch of nervous nellies. Democracy wins in the end. That's the lesson of the last couple of hundred years.
 
Geez, you know, I have to say you guys are such a bunch of nervous nellies. Democracy wins in the end. That's the lesson of the last couple of hundred years.

But the interesting part is what happens in between. Its like saying the Yugoslav wars are unimportant because it ended in democracy. Which saying that will probably get my ass beat down in rl.
 
But the interesting part is what happens in between. Its like saying the Yugoslav wars are unimportant because it ended in democracy. Which saying that will probably get my ass beat down in rl.

I was kind of waiting for something to bring up the Yugoslavia wars. Interesting case that one. Tito goes, no replacement, country devolves into civil war. Would Iraq go that way?

Unlikely. Yugoslavia was a strongly multi-ethnic, multicultural state with dramatic historical differences. Croats and Slovenes, Bosnians and Serbs and Albanians all held distinct regions, spoke distinct languages, used different scripts, practiced different religions. It was a mountainous geographically divided region, and it had been organized into a federation which reinforced those differences. Civil war was pretty much nigh inevitable.

Iraq, on the other hand was mostly (excluding the Kurds and Turkmen) an Arab ethnic/Arab speaking state, it was situated on a floodplain, and its road and river system encouraged unity. Politically, it was organized as a unitary state.

Under those circumstances, I'd say transition to democracy was a pretty likely outcome, more or less inevitable, and within two or three years at most of Saddam passing.
 
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