When do assassinations of bad guys ever change anything?

Was anyone so stupid as to actually believe a show trial and
eliminating Saddam could cause utopia to break out in Iraq? Another
bloody dictator will take over as soon as we pull the troops, whether
that's in 50 days or 50 years. The only difference is the new one
will be an ally with Iran.

The book _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ pointed out over a decade ago
that Hitler had widespread support. Assassinate Hitler and another
genocidal leader would have done the exact same thing.

Maybe you can argue assassinating good guys like Lincoln, JFK or Rabin
makes things worse, but there is no reason to believe the converse is
true.

Society benefits by preventing assassinations. That's why we have the
Secret Service, FBI and BATF. To keep gun nuts from popping off
gummint officials.

On Jun 22, 10:46 am, BretCah...@peoplepc.com wrote:

But we didn't assasinate Saddam, we invaded, killed over one hundred
thousand Iraqi's, devastated the country, and *then* got Saddam
executed. If we'd assasinated him instead, many Iraqis would be alive
that are now dead, and the country's infrastructure would be in much
better shape. If, I say if, the choice is between war and
assassination, assassination is better.

Admittedly a show trial takes longer than an assassination. Other
than that there's no difference.

That's irrelevant as far as the value of getting a bad leader killed.

It's independent of the fact that getting Saddam killed [by either
show trial or assassination] didn't change anything.

Short of having alternative, parallel universes where we
can compare actual results, you cannot prove that assertion
as a generality.

However, short of parallel universes, there is such a thing
as "common sense" as a guideline.

Asassinating Hitler might well have prevented the Holocaust,
because much of the Nazis movement was coalescing around one, particular,
hypnotic, charismatic cult leader. The movement was as dependent on him
as the Church of Scientology would have been dependent on
L. Ron Hubbard.

That is part of the problem, that a wise assassin of conscience
would face. It is *unknowable*, the results of what we do,
much less provable or demonstrable to others. Even *after* the fact.
We cannot analyze history with certainty, much less predict the future.

We live in a world of guesswork and must make Life-and-Death decisions
in a framework of what is essentially guesswork.

"rightards now that the GOP, or at least the rightard wing of the GOP,
is dead.

I dunno 'bout that. Remember "Night of the Living Dead"?

I do recollect my grandpappy sayin' to me, once,
"Boy, nothin' is ever dead until its been killed."

Tom Keske

If the assassin hasn't filled the power vacuum _with something
worthwhile_ then merely removing the bad leader does no good.

The vacuum will just suck in more garbage.

Colin Powell said the same thing back in 1992 when asked about
invading Iraq to take out Saddam:

"We didn't see any Jeffersons there to take over."

The assassasin promoters make a classic cause and effect error with
Hitler. Hitler's "charisma" had more to do with him being a follower
of the German people than a leader.

I'll go even further. If someone had dropped Jefferson, Madison,
DeTocqueville, et. al. down into 1930s Germany to straighten things
out they would have complained, "hey, give us a place with something
to work with. These Germans are already walking dead. There's no way
to change their fate even with massive enlightenment in so short a
time . . ."

Herman Hesse knew in the 1920s what would happen:

"These Germans would rather die than change the way they think and
they will die."

When they are irreplaceable. Hitler is often billed as such, but actually
he was only the front man, the political speaker, for the German Army. If
he had been assassinated, they would have just picked another one.

Yes. The Republicans thought the murder of Saddam was a good murder. They
were wrong.

Above all, the new dictator will be an Iraqi who is not a puppet of a
hostile foreign invading army.

For sure.

Only the neocons believed that. None of the other Republican office
holders believed it including Bush and Cheney.

Bush told a reporter and Cheney is on a YouTube video agreeing that
taking out Saddam would be needless loss of life, eternal
quagmire . . . a war crime per se.

Intent, often so difficult to establish in a prosecution, is trivial
in the cases of Cheney and Bush.

The only reason Repugs went along with the harebrained scheme was
because after the high tax Clinton economic boom, jingoism was their
last hope.

On Jun 22, 10:46 am, BretCah...@peoplepc.com wrote:

Well, that should be ok with you. Isn't that what "the people" wanted?

Fred Weiss

Clearly the death of Stalin changed the human rights situation in the
Soviet Union considerably. Whether it was natural or anthropogenic
would not have mattered in that case. You need to get out of that
remedial school run by union thugs and read some history.

Well, at least you don't deny the genocide charge. And would
a little more shooting power on the part of the blacks in Darfur
help prevent _their_ extermination by the islamofascist regime
there?