Assassination of a Dictator

Share your opinions (for, against, neutral) about the policy of assassinating political leaders without due process.

 

I'm generally against...it may sound horrible, but in some instances a country can be more stable under a dictatorship. Not necessarily in a beneficial way, though.

 

More beneficial how? Can you give a few examples?

 

I think I know what Four Bear means. I have friends in the oil business who lived in Chile under the Pinochet regime. They say that doing business there was very easy, well organized and good for them. With the overthrow of Pinochet, it all went to rot. Of course, that's a view with only one side ...business ...but for business it was more stable.

 

I am against death penalty, no matter what. I believe the best punishment for someone, be it a murderer or a dictator or whoever deserve that kind of punishment, is life in prison without parole and forced to do hard labor until they died. Make their lives a living hell! That's the kind of punishment I believe is best.

 

So your saying that death is the easy way out?! Interesting.

 

Let me throw a wrench into things ...back when there were unofficial assassinations that remained a mystery as to who did it ...do you think there were less military actions. Let's say in the case of IRaq that the CIA still could go in and off Saddam Hussein. There might not have been a war.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by the "without due process" part, but I think assassinating people is a legitimate option in situations where if it wasn't available you'd have to go to war. If you can achieve a political change by killing one person (the head), thats by far a better option than starting a war that would kill and injure orders of magnitude more.

Without getting into the death penalty issue itself, I don't think assignation is a punishment, its a tool for change. Heads of state are difficult people to get access to, you cant just walk in and arrest them. Dropping a bomb on them though, or slipping some poison in food, more dooable. If that helps you avoid a bloody war, the math makes it hard to say no.

Thinking about the "due process" part, I would say a (maybe secret?) declaration of war would be sufficient due process. The people we kill in war don't get trials before we shoot them, but its not said that there was a violation of due process. Its not that they're guilty or innocent, its that they were in the way of the social change we were trying to effect.

 

In the case of Saddam Hussein, the due process part was something of a joke. He was going to be convicted and he was going to be hung. Case closed. Had he shot himself or accidentally stepped on a mine, we would have been better off rather than the farce of a death he eventually encountered.