Old friends amp; new foes

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has joined a rogue's gallery of villains blacklisted by the United States, which has a tradition of...

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has joined a rogue8217;s gallery of villains blacklisted by the United States, which has a tradition of demonising enemy foreign leaders. President Bill Clinton compared the Serbian leader to the biggest bogey man of all time as he prepared Americans for going to war over the Kosovo conflict.

8220;What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier? How many people8217;s lives might have been saved?8221; he asked.Of course, US arch-enemy number one continues to be Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He is known as the Butcher of Baghdad,8217; who unleashes chemical weapons on his own people and allows an embargo to starve them by rejecting weapons inspections.

Close behind comes Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the terrorist8217; target of 1986 US air strikes who is currently locked in a battle over the extradition of two Libyans charged with the PanAm airliner bombing.

Closer to home is Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a ruthless dictator8217; whose enduringCommunist regime just 200 km off US shores has been an emasculating humiliation for US administrations since the 1959 revolution.

The United States has hauled in one nemesis. Former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is pining away in a US jail where he is serving jail time on drug and money laundering charges.

The pock-marked general, known here as pineapple face,8217; was arrested by US troops in December 1989 during a military invasion of Panama and taken to Miami where he was tried and convicted.

Name calling, by the way, is the American way when it comes to demonising one8217;s enemies. To wit, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan once dubbed the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping a 8220;chain-smoking communist dwarf8221;.The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini personified anti-Americanism with his 1979 Islamic revolution after the fall of the Shah and was considered the devil himself when he held 53 US hostages for 444 days.

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In Africa there was Idi Amin, the Ugandan despot now living in exile in Saudi Arabia,and in Asia there was Cambodia8217;s genocidal dictator, Pol Pot, who died last year.

But evil is apparently in the eye of the beholder. Some of these enemies were once friends. Milosevic went from war criminal8217; to peacemaker in the 1995 Dayton negotiations to end the Bosnia conflict and then back to war criminal. Summing up the confusion, US envoy Richard Holbrooke calls him a 8220;likable rogue8221;. Washington backed Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war and Noriega was once on the US intelligence payroll.

Indeed, the tendency to demonise can muddy foreign policy waters, according to American University military expert Michael Salla. 8220;These individuals, be they presidents or dictators, in many cases are fairly unscrupulous characters that abuse their own citizens, and sometimes have some justification for why they do certain things,8221; he said. But Milosevic8217;s vilification, Salla said 8220;is more accurate than not8221;.

8211;Agence France Presse