It is possible that dictatorship, if enlightened, can bring certain undeniable benefits to a lot of the populace: state socialism is the most obvious example, and so are Kemalism, Ba'athism, Nasserism, and so forth. States governed by leaders who develop such ideologies backed by armed forces that, under their solid command, share their ideologies can, for instance, allow women to enjoy certain rights sooner than masses, including most women themselves, learn to demand, let alone attain, on their own.
Nevertheless, rights attained under such conditions, from a (if not the) socialist point of view, are not as valuable gains as rights that people win on their own, developing capacities to conquer more. Democracy* should be defended against dictatorship, even if democracy brought temporary setbacks to women and others in one respect or another. Dictatorship is in the end only defensible if the alternative is domination by the empire or subversion by terrorists (such as those of the al-Qaeda tendency), both of which are worse than even dictatorship, as Iraq today clearly demonstrates, now plagued by both. * Democracy should not be equated with elections, needless to say, though representative democracy with multi-party elections can be more or less democratic. More precisely, democracy is room for struggle. -- Yoshie
