A fascinating FT op-ed on what Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein have in common:

On the 50th anniversary of his death, the two paramount threats to world peace today, Saddam Hussein and President Kim Il-Jong of North Korea, openly base themselves and their regimes on Stalin. When Kim Il-Jong recently visited Moscow on a surreal train journey, he proudly informed Vladimir Putin he was travelling in the armoured train given to his father as a present by Stalin. As analysts of the regime agree, this merely illustrates the extraordinary, reverential detail with which Kim and his founding father Kim Il-Sung have maintained a complete Stalinist state into the 21st century: the Korean Workers Party is a replica of the Bolsheviks. In both North Korea and Iraq, the absolute political control of a tiny oligarchy, the propaganda state, economic centralisation, the interlocking labyrinth of security forces, and the preposterous cult of personality are self-consciously Stalinist....

Stalin, like Saddam, survived in power because he so terrorised his people that however great his blunders, there was no opposition left alive. But whatever his origins, Stalin turned himself by will and dynamic intelligence into a gradualist, patient, often restrained statesman, as well as a well-read history-buff who could debate the virtues of Marlborough and Wellington with Churchill. However well he plays western democracies, Saddam rules a divided and diminished realm which he may soon lose due to his own blunders....

the parallels are useful: the queasy cocktail of leftists and useful idiots who protest against war with Iraq truly resemble the muddleheads who supported Stalin's awful experiment. Kim is a Stalin heir with nuclear weapons, a living argument for stopping the Stalin of Mesopotamia before he acquires his.

Read the whole piece.