Michael Rubin – Commentary Magazine

Massoud Barzani’s eldest sons Masrour and Mansour are giving Uday’s Saddam reputation a run for its money.

When it comes to bizarre and buffoonish behavior among leaders in the world, Kim Jong-un might be the leader of the pack, but the talent is deep in Middle East: Muammar Gaddafi would rant and rave. His UN speeches were feats of endurance for the audience as much as for Gaddafi himself. He surrounded himself with female bodyguards and his physical transformation rivaled only Michael Jackson. Gaddafi’s son Hannibal was a chip off the old block: After he and his wife beat two servants in a Swiss hotel, they arrested him. The resulting vendetta culminated with Gaddafi calling for a jihad against Switzerland.  published on Ekurd

Qaddafi, of course, was not alone. Saddam Hussein might have been evil, but he was not crazy: he was cold, calculating, and ruthless, but he was positively sane next to his eldest son Uday Hussein. Uday’s exploits are well-known: He was a rapist, murderer, and psychopath. When Iraq’s national soccer team lost a game, he would beat them. Torture was for him an amusing game.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has inherited Gaddafi’s mantle for the flamboyant and bizarre. He is unrepentantly corrupt, thin-skinned, and conspiratorial. Whereas many rulers can be dictatorial and/or adversarial, Erdoğan increasingly seems simply unhinged.

The Saudi royal family is notoriously cloistered, but some of the princes are hardly bastions of virtue behind the scenes. A single Saudi prince killed 2,100 endangered birds while on vacation in Pakistan. Heck, taking a vacation to Pakistan is hardly evidence of sound mind. And other Saudi royals stand accused of worse.

Even in Iraqi Kurdistan, normally thought of as an oasis of stability, there is quite a lot of crazy. Former President Jalal Talabani effectively exiled his eldest son Bafil to London as his behavior grew erratic, and Kurdish President Massoud Barzani’s eldest sons Masrour and Mansour are giving Uday’s reputation a run for its money. Not everyone would consider attacking a family rival in a Virginia dentist’s office wise, and even fewer would act on their impulse.

Why is it that the Middle East has become not only a region of dictatorships, but also a region of crazy? Under Saddam there was a joke about the sycophancy and the infallibility of rulers: Tariq Aziz was giving a press conference in which a reporter asked him whether elephants could fly. He answered “Of course not,” but then another journalist pointed out that Saddam said elephants could fly. Without missing a beat, Aziz said, “Ah, yes, but only very slowly.” In such a situation, Erdoğan has become Saddam’s successor as the master of flying elephants; no journalist would tell the sultan he has no clothes lest his newspaper be closed and he or his family imprisoned.

There are other reasons as well, especially when it comes to the children. As open and democratic as some leaders claim their countries to be, family remains paramount. Rulers surround themselves with sycophants who affirm their every move. To have been a Gaddafi, Barzani, or Saudi from the right line was to never have to say sorry. There were two sets of rules, mutually exclusive: That of the country and society and that of the family. Countries were mere playgrounds where even the most horrific abuse could be covered up with money. Money, power, and fame can be a volatile combination when mixed.

Leaders like Gaddafi and Barzani might consider themselves great thinkers or statesmen, but they tend to be poor fathers, allowing their children to grow up surrounded by servants who cater to their children’s every need and confuse respect for the leader with absolute deference to the child. Limits are arbitrary and ephemeral, and morality optional.

There is no hard-and-fast rule, and of course the individual matters. Qusay may have been bad, but he was not Uday; Qubad has not followed in Bafil’s footprints; and for every Saudi prince who becomes a psychopath, there are dozens who are merely massively spoiled.

An oddity of the odious is an obsession with Hollywood. Kim Jong-un, for example, is famously obsessed with Hollywood. First Lady Asma al-Assad pow-wowed with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. King Abdullah II of Jordan doesn’t fit the same moral mold, but he is a dictator—and a notorious trekkie. Perhaps, then, a good analogy to the crazy infusing the Middle East are Hollywood’s child stars. Being famous young and surrounded by sycophants has famously taken its toll on some child stars but not all. For every Lindsay Lohan there is a Mayim Bialik; and for every Macaulay Culkin there is a Ron Howard. Culture, upbringing, and values matter.

How tragic it is then that beyond war, terrorism, and potential recession, so much sycophancy, corruption, and impunity has transformed so many current and next generation leaders in the Middle East to the political equivalent of the cast of Different Strokes.

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