and what kind of leader do you think Warren "I don't pay enough in taxes" Buffet would be? And certainly, if you needed to keep the college-educated bleeding-heart middle classes and upper middle classes on your side, you would be forced to use tactics even less effective than what the us military currently uses in the middle east, which from here look pretty ineffective.
Hell, look at Gates; a guy who could almost be called bloodthirsty as a businessman, ends up donating some huge portion of his fortune to some feel-good charity.
I just don't think those guys have what it takes to be a Saddam. Even if they did; being ruthless and having a matériel and technology advantage is not always enough. Look at how Afghanistan kicked the crap out of the USSR. This wasn't 'cause the USSR was afraid to wipe out villages with it's vastly superior armament... this was because with currently available weapons, it's damn hard to occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied.
Re: Afghanistan v. the Soviets
The British could do it. I see no reason to believe the Afghans would be able to put more than a dent in total air superiority so they could have won the same way.
If the russians could have won through total air superiority, they would have. because they had it, and it didn't make the difference.
I imagine that flight was a greater advantage when it was new, before the insurgents figured out how to effectively counter it (which is to say, to hide amongst civilians friendly to the enemy or to stay underground)
but yeah, I think, at this point, advances in asymmetrical warfare techniques have largely neutralized the advantages of air superiority.
Certainly our current leaders are not the type to mass murder unemployed Americans. But these things can change. Nobody in the 1920s thought that the Germans would soon be trying to exterminate unwanted ethnic groups and colonize Eastern Europe like whites colonized North America (nobody except Hitler, who had already planned it).
Hell, look at Gates; a guy who could almost be called bloodthirsty as a businessman, ends up donating some huge portion of his fortune to some feel-good charity.
I just don't think those guys have what it takes to be a Saddam. Even if they did; being ruthless and having a matériel and technology advantage is not always enough. Look at how Afghanistan kicked the crap out of the USSR. This wasn't 'cause the USSR was afraid to wipe out villages with it's vastly superior armament... this was because with currently available weapons, it's damn hard to occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied.