I hate to bring it up, but the lady lawyer may turn out to have a point.
It does appear that the Yugoslavs needed a dictator, if they were to continue as a single country anyway. Remove the dictator and his country, which had been quite functional by Eastern European commie standards, blew apart in civil war.
We have yet to find out if the same thing will happen in Iraq. I'm cautiously hopeful that it won't, but I'm certainly not going to be shocked if Iraq is not an intact functioning democracy in five years.
Yugoslavia blew more because of the collapse of the Soviet Union than Tito's death. Tito had been dead for many years and still the Yugoslavs hung together out of fear of a Soviet invasion.
The nation had been highly artificial from the start and was much more a product of the fortunes of wars than any authentic union of like peoples. The very name "Yugoslavs" merely means "south Slavs", hardly the rallying cry of burning national identity. It was made of up peoples who had fought each other of countless centuries and had never stopped distrusting each other into modern times.
Ultimately a nation comprised of half dozen major peoples most with their own languages, two alphabets, and two antithetical religions was unsustainable. The profoundly evil Milosovich capitalized upon these divisions and insured the end was a violent one.
Iraq is also a highly artificial nation as are most of the Arab nations. It was a creation designed to serve the past interests of western powers. It has the advantage of being comprised principally of Arabic speaking Arabs who predominately practice the same religion. It has the disadvantage of including a large Kurdish region and of have two antagonistic Islamic sects.
I think it is even money whether Iraq can maintain a democracy. Over the longer haul the country is bound to split up if for no other reason than it is a phony state.
you said :"It does appear that the Yugoslavs needed a dictator"
Well, Slovenia came out just fine.
Croatia went thru some turbulence, but they're much better now (for Croatians, that is).
Freedom is the natural yearning of the human spirit. No human being WANTS to be enslaved. It is just that, when a people has been subjugated for a long time, there are always some scores to settle, etc... when the yoke is removed. Growing pains of a nascent democracy, if you will.
What you say is reasonable. It's just that I think a fragmented nation like the former Yugoslavia is better than living under Tito. Democracy sometimes has some friction, disagreement or conflict, but a Communist government makes a country a dungeon and worse.
Of the two, I'd choose to live in the fragmented, factious scene.