Those despots

It takes a Robert Fisk - veteran journalist and author of anything to do with the Middle East - as 2011 comes to an end writing in The Indpendent to reflect on the despots in the Middle East.

We are so keen to analyse the revolutions that tore the Middle East's dictatorships apart this year that we have forgotten the record of endurance of these vicious men and their sheer, dogged, ruthless power to survive. European autocrats could sometimes manage a few decades: Hitler lasted only 12 years, Mussolini 21; Franco at 39 years, Salazar at 36 and Stalin at 31 years were exceptions. But Gaddafi survived for 42 years, Ali Abdullah Saleh 33 (and counting), Mubarak 30, the Assad family 41 years (also counting), the House of Saud – as rulers of Saudi Arabia – has so far lasted 69 years and the al-Khalifa family (rulers of modern Bahrain) a mere 228 years. How do these guys cling on? A patriarchal society, a religion that speaks of submission, a refusal to rebel when Western enemies are "at the gates", tribalism? Or is this just a reflection of our own "civilisation"? "People will endure their tyrants for years," that old fraud Woodrow Wilson told his chief propagandist George Creel as they set sail for the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, "but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately." Just so in Egypt, already in Libya, we fear, and quite possibly in Syria; speak it not in Yemen. Only brave little Tunisia has held its post-revolutionary nerve.