Of all the dilemmas millions of oppressed and impoverished people of the world are forced to confront, the cruellest of all is this: if the oppressive regime is of long standing and is particularly brutal in controlling its people, the breakdown of the government and attendant misery that follows its downfall will be exceedingly painful.
The argument is simply that an oppressive regime that has lasted long enough to embed itself in the population, that controls every public institution and that has eradicated all civil society institutions will be impossible to overthrow without severe disruption to people’s daily lives. In weighing up this predicament, high-risk people will naturally ask which is the better devil. Only they can provide the answer.
No matter that the regime’s insertion into the population may be achieved by a vast network of civilian spies who rat on dissident neighbours (the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic); or that the regime may secure its dominance by brazenly privileging particular clans or tribes over others (Syria); or that dissidence on the part of any person or group is met with the most brutal repression (take your pick), the mechanisms whereby the tentacles of a rejected state insert themselves into the lives of the oppressed are powerful, sustainable and not easily ignored.
No matter that the oppressive regime may use its unfettered control over all public institutions to deny dissident regions, groups and individuals access to basic services and funding; or that by crushing civil society there will be no alternative sources of support for the deprived citizenry. The hard fact remains that by removing a long-established oppressive regime that commands all of society’s institutions and resources, the country is left with a political environment inimical to an orderly transition from gross oppression to democracy.
Rather, what remains is a power vacuum that is quickly filled by warlords and their militia, and by regional or ethnically based contenders for political power. Or, at best, by a fragile regime barely able to deliver public services, including personal security. In short, what is left is chaos, usually resulting in a military dictatorship (Egypt) or balkanisation and persistent state failure (Libya).
These grim outcomes are all but guaranteed when the destruction of the oppressive regime is secured by an invading power. This is the case even when the invading power has “boots on the ground”, a physical military presence in the invaded country (Iraq, Afghanistan). But a vacuum is absolutely certain to result when the collapse of the regime is achieved by bombers thousands of feet above the country in question or by commandos falling from the sky late at night to “arrest” the offending president and spirit him away to face the courts of the invader.
Is South Africa an exception? Our transition, which was widely expected to be accompanied by a racial bloodbath and post-liberation chaos, was achieved without generating the power vacuum that has characterised the other countries mentioned here. But in our case the apartheid government was restrained from exercising maximum repressive force by the economy’s absolute dependence on the labour of the oppressed majority.
This restraint was thus also manifest in the inability of the government to comprehensively stamp out civil society or the trade union movement, which strongly supported the liberation project. Moreover, here the liberation process was clearly led by a century-old movement that enjoyed considerable internal legitimacy and understood the imperative to guarantee the lives and property of the supporters of the ousted government, including the jobs of government employees.
The institutional forces that ousted the apartheid government were thus “ready to govern”. The South African transition was no “miracle”. The circumstances that condemned so many countries ousting an oppressive government to a subsequent political vacuum were thankfully not present.
An interesting contemporary exception may be Syria, where a brutal, thoroughly destructive regime has been ousted by an army in opposition whose leadership was deemed too “radical”, too “Islamic”, to govern the shattered country. But forgotten in all the anxious breast-beating at the idea that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) would assume political power in Syria is that the party and its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had constituted the de facto government of the Idlib province for some eight years, where it maintained basic governance structures such as taxation, the provision of services, policing and the administration of courts. The HTS was thus also relatively ready to govern.
However, the slight prospect of an orderly transition to democracy in Iran has been shattered by the US and Israel, whose leaders are yet to come up with the objectives of their drastic action. Israel, I’m convinced, has no interest in Iran transitioning to democracy. If it were in its power, the Israel government, supported by most citizens, would reduce Iran to the pile of rubble that Gaza has become, a permanently crippled, ungovernable territory incapable of troubling Israel.
President Benjamin Netanyahu may have to be content with a merely weakened Iran. But as long as Iran doesn’t disturb the remainder of his prime ministership, and as long as it further delays his corruption trial, victory for Israel will have been secured.
However, the slight prospect of an orderly transition to democracy in Iran has been shattered by the US and Israel, whose leaders are yet to come up with the objectives of their drastic action.
US President Donald Trump has, in the fashion of a multiple-choice test, presented an array of possible objectives. He clearly believes his recent Venezuelan adventure was a resounding success. Never mind that the US has, in effect, endorsed the same government minus its strongman, Nicolas Maduro, and that Venezuela’s economy, with particular emphasis on its oil industry, is now governed from Washington.
Trump would probably live with a fairly functional Iranian government, ever grateful to its American counterpart that saved it from the theocracy. But don’t hold your breath. The US-Israeli air invasion has yet to displace the theocracy, which many think will prove more resilient than Trump believes. It may well unite the divided Muslim community against those who have so brazenly murdered their religious leader.
But we just don’t know what Trump hopes to achieve, and all this speculation may presume greater rationality than his increasingly deranged mind is able to process. What we do know is that having dispatched “the world’s biggest aircraft carrier” to join “the biggest armada ever assembled”, the “greatest president America has ever known” has put on the greatest show on earth. And he did it, using his toys, unconstrained by any competing centre of power in the American polity.
What next? Take out Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky? Invade Greenland? Arrest Canada’s Mark Carney? Send a fleet of armed drones to bomb northern Mexico? All bets are off.
A lunatic is in charge of the asylum. That’s the problem.
• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a co-founder and director of Corruption Watch.
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