I can't dig up the quote just now, but I recall Christopher Hitchens saying during his illness that among his regrets about his imminent death was that he would be unable to write the obituaries of some of his enemies. He was referring to figures such as Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa, though I'm sure, at a pinch, he would have been persuaded to add a figure like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, dead at 70*.
Hitchens missed the event by just days, but as Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell points out on Twitter, he had the comfort of seeing several other dictators fall off their perches in 2011.
* Many other news outlets are saying he was 69. According to Wikipedia, it depends on whether you go by Soviet or North Korean records.
