North Korea's Kim Jong Il, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Burma's Than Shwe, Syria's Bashar al-Assad

The Age Of The Celebrity Tyrant

By Claudia Rosett
Thursday, August 27, 2009
- Forbes

Move over, Hollywood, Bollywood and all the rest of you glitterati. The world has entered the age of the Celebrity Tyrant. Hardly a week goes by without the exploits of some despot or other snatching the headlines—whether it’s North Korea’s Kim Jong Il hosting Bill Clinton for dinner and a detainee pickup; Muammar al-Qaddafi celebrating the parole of one of his Lockerbie-bombing terrorist agents; or Burma’s Than Shwe milking the hostage-politics racket for a house call from Senator Jim Webb.

Not that despots are anything new. But about a generation back, they were a lot less bold and a lot less rich in cachet. What with the 1991 Soviet collapse and the waves of democratization then sweeping Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, dictatorship had become something of an embarrassment. Even just a few years ago, despots were a breed largely beyond the pale, with the late Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole, al-Qaddafi trying to placate the American cowboy and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad teetering on his dynastic perch.

No longer. With regime change off the table, and President Obama dishing out “mutual respectâ€