Limited options for retiring dictators, even one with nuclear warheads

Uneasy lies the head of a dictator while mobs demonstrate against him and rebels rampage over his fiefdom. The trouble is, there's no retirement programme for dictators. Nobody ever heard of a dictator, faced with the need to flee or get killed or thrown into a dungeon, saying: 'OK, I quit, now it's somebody else's turn to be a dictator.' Instead, dictators not only hang on for dear life; they try to ensure that their progeny carry on if - heaven forbid - they prove to be mere mortals after all.

That's the problem across the Middle East, from Libya to Syria, and also in a number of other countries where dictators aren't always in danger of losing their jobs but love to make life miserable for their long-suffering people while amassing billions for themselves. Dictatorial bosses, unless they are owners figuring out how to divide their assets among their sons and daughters, have to step aside at some specific age. Dictators never fade away. If they're lucky, they slip into forced exile. Otherwise, they hang on until death and they are memorialised in statues and place names.

So it is in North Korea, whose dictator for life, Kim Jong-il, has survived any number of illnesses, and possibly palace coup attempts we know nothing about, and now is selling the singular qualifications and achievements of his youngest son to no doubt disbelieving but accepting Russians and Chinese, and everyone else who counts. The Russians and Chinese, no fools, cannot think Kim Jong-un has done much to distinguish himself, despite his rank of four-star general, but that doesn't matter as long as North Korea serves as a buffer against the evil aims of the Americans, Japanese and other historic regional control freaks.

The Americans are no better when it comes to coddling dictators whose interests are seen as coinciding with those of the United States. The US has never been good at explaining why regimes in Saudi Arabia and lesser kingdoms on the Persian Gulf are OK when their records show they are anything but. It's s also possible to conjure up the names of dictators, from Central and South America to Africa to eastern Europe, who have been quite liked by Washington just because they are on the right side of whatever benighted interests the US was pursuing.

Sometimes, to be sure, American leaders and diplomats have had a terrible time rationalising their policies even to themselves. They had trouble during and after the Korean war, for instance, swallowing Syngman Rhee and finally shipped him, in 1960, to that resting ground for no-longer-needed 'pro-American' leaders, namely Hawaii. Rhee set a precedent for later dictators whom Washington came to view as a nuisance or an embarrassment, such as the Philippines' long-time ruler, Ferdinand Marcos, who was flown to Hawaii in 1986 after his ouster in a 'people power' revolt.

Would that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi or Syria's Bashar al-Assad could accept a similar fate. As dictators, they definitely qualify for retirement in Hawaii, but, too bad, they're not American allies. Then again, maybe something will open up for them. Who would have believed Uganda's Idi Amin, after years of terrorising and massacring his people, would have found aid and comfort in exile in Saudi Arabia? Then there was Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. They were trying to get to the airport in Bucharest for a flight to Beijing when anti-communist forces grabbed them, executing them on Christmas Day in 1989.