As for Thaksin, he is in many ways a compromised figure, ready to use his vast fortune to gain power. But was he the kind of strongman whose actions justified his overthrow by the military? What is clear is that the opposition party refused to participate in elections because it knew it would lose to him. “The solution would have been to enforce the law,” a prominent business consultant, Apirux Wanasathop, told me in July. He was speaking of the refusal of the police and army to restore order in Thailand by stopping the rampages by the Yellow Shirts. While Thaksin was in power, he said, he “still had to be accountable” to voters and the courts. “He would have been checked, but there is no check on the military.”