BRAVADO IS THE LAST BASTION OF A DICTATORIAL REGIME

Some dictators never learn that bravado is the last bastion of a dictatorial regime. They never see the end coming, even when the hangman's noose is tied around their neck, an angry mob is knocking at their door or the rifles of a firing squad are leveled in their direction. In their final moments, dictators cling to the mythical notion that their own greatness will somehow rise above the situation and restore order. All that is necessary is a healthy dose of bravado!

Take Saddam Hussein, for instance, the former dictator of Iraq who boasted during the run-up to the U.S.-led attack on his country in March of 2003 that every Iraqi citizen would lay down their lives for him to repel any foreign invasion. When the attack came, seventy-five percent of his army immediately laid down their weapons and Saddam was forced into hiding. Shiites living in Iraq, who comprised nearly ninety percent of the population and who had been brutally oppressed by Saddam's regime, immediately took up the cause of hunting him down. Saddam was finally captured, found hiding in a hole in the ground. He was living like a filthy beggar. Later, he was hung with onlookers cursing at him and snapping pictures of the event on their cell phones. So much for bravado!

Last year, when Libyan rebels initiated the uprising that eventually deposed Libyan dictator, Muammar Gadaffi, the grandiose Gadaffi took to the media airways and, like Saddam, boasted that his loving countrymen and women would annihilate the rebel attackers and restore peace and justice to the Libyan nation. Gadaffi boasted that he would fight to the death and become a martyr, if necessary. Instead, his final moments were spent trying to escape through a storm drain, and his death came not from a hail of enemy gunfire, but from the kicking boots of a mob of his own countrymen. They too snapped pictures of the event on their cell phones.

This past Wednesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal regime has killed thousands of Syrian civilians during the past year in an unmerciful crackdown against anti-government protesters, boasted that his government would hunt down his opposition to the last man and that order and honor under his leadership would be restored. That's a pretty big stretch considering that al-Assad has had to use his military to bomb whole cities into submission. And still, the protests continue.

Al-Assad, like Gadaffi and Hussein before him, refuses to read the writing on the wall. He clings to the belief that a magical aura will descend upon his nation and restore his mighty rule. He believes his own bravado. He has to. It's his last bastion. He just doesn't know it yet.