Eragonlatrilogia.com

But somehow the bad guys no longer measure up.Villainy is not a simple matter. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, the three super-villains of the 20th century, of course set the bar impossibly high. But there are measurable qualifications: the perpetration of massive acts of savagery, and a proven readiness to inflict endless misery on one's own as well as other peoples to retain power.Geographic proximity counts as well. Even in the global village, the bad guy must live on the same street to catch our attention Saddam, however, meets all the criteria of villainy. He might have operated thousands of miles away, but that was close enough for British ground troops to be sent into combat against him, and near enough for us to be within range of one of those rockets he's supposed to be developing.Slobodan Milosevic met the conditions too, but he's left the villainy business.

It must be said that his fall was a bit of a disappointment for connoisseurs of villainy: no Hitleresque Götterdämmerung or arraignment before a foreign court to answer for his crimes (at least not yet); just retirement to a pleasant, well-guarded villa in his capital. So farewell to the Butcher of Belgrade and, if the rumourmongers are right, to the Butcher of Baghdad as well, shortly.In vain I search for substitutes. Readers are invited to make their own nominations, but no obvious candidate stands out. Osama bin Laden, purportedly the mastermind of a global network of terrorism from some Afghan lair, scares the wits out of CNN and the Pentagon, but he comes across as an improbable, rather romantic figure, whose connection with some of the wickednesses attributed to him is, pace the US government, less than proven.Vladimir Putin has potential, what with the Chechen war, his KGB background and authoritarian tendencies But he hasn't been bad enough yet. Next door in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenka may be the despotic ruler of Europe's last Communist state. But he's too piffling to matter.North Korea's new leader seems almost cuddly, and, even if he wasn't, the country is simply too far away to strike a chord with us. So too are the old men who rule China, however miserable their human rights record, and however alarming their empire-building ambitions.

Their doings do not impinge on us.In wretched Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, for all his thuggery and reverse racism, simply doesn't cut the mustard. Elsewhere in Africa, misrule and mayhem are business as usual. Nor does the original Reagan raghead, Muammar Gaddafi, he of the PC Yvonne Fletcher murder and (maybe) Lockerbie, qualify. Anyway, haven't we just restored full diplomatic relations with Libya? Ditto Iran, another alleged fomenter of international terrorism. Britain might have been second on the ayatollahs' hit list, as lapdog of the Great Satan in Washington; but the Iranians always had the mitigating virtue of being sworn foes of Saddam.Even Madeleine Albright, with her Manichean view of the world born of childhood memories of Hitler's and Stalin's takeovers of her native Czechoslovakia, has had to throw in the towel.