Ramesh Ponnuru makes largely strong points against John Derbyshire's foreign policy beliefs ("Good through 1975," reads the label) but errs in assuming that a desirable government in Iraq, one that "wasn't a threat to its neighbors," could "theoretically have been achieved with a strongman."
There is no such thing as a strongman who is not interested in subjugating his neighbor. Only considerations of military inferiority or domestic stability have ever prevented an authoritarian state from expanding. Over the last twenty-five years the array of Near East client states — with the exception of Ba'athist Iraq and to an arguably lesser extent, Syria — has served as Exhibit A for the illusory concept of "benevolent dictatorship." Before that, of course, Arab and Persian designs on Israel were far more than pat state propaganda. The Near East's artificial, geopolitical stasis — engendered by the Cold War, aided by those dictatorial societies' slow entropy and managed by the West for ten years after Soviet collapse — remains one of the most compelling motivations for interstate warfare by non-state actors that is modern terrorism.
Cultures based on strength, fear and distrust celebrate conquest and inequity. Thuggish aspirant citizens or ruling class members deprived of conquest once needed to gain control of a state; technology has made that requirement conditional. For decades, stateless authoritarians — Yasser Arafat, Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, Osama bin Laden, select your own terrorist — have been streaming from what were once considered "stable" countries. For any dictatorship that is not heavily influenced by liberalism, malignance of the government or the empowered criminal minority is simply a matter of time and circumstances.
Consider what a given ruler might do if he commanded power equal to or greater than ours. Would Pervez Musharraf still be the roly-poly, deferential war ally? King Abdullah, Amman's dapper Arab front man? How long would Taiwan last from the moment Beijing determined that its People's Liberation Army could fend off the rest of the world? Dictators are to be tolerated only so long as free nations cannot replace them and the culture they perpetuate, militarily or diplomatically, through democratization. They certainly should not be created with our approval.