Be nice, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, with the police and army behind him, the opposition is slightly screwed.

The trouble with "wouldn't it be nice if..." is that it tends to believe two wrongs make a right. Such as "wouldn't it be nice if someone shot Slobodan Milosevic/Saddam Hussein/Muammar Gaddhafi?" Whilst this would generally be a service to humanity, someone's got to go and do it. Without organised opposition in that country (think particularly of Iraq), that requires outside assistance - in other words, get the CIA/SAS to go in and assassinate them.

This is great if you assume we know who the enemy is, and that he's in the wrong, and that killing him is justified. This is the "benevolent dictator" model of someone standing on high and passing down judgement. But if you get it wrong - oh boy, we're back in the Cold War, with the CIA trying to assassinate people and the US starting wars bcos they don't agree with the political ideology of the elected government. The film GI Jane gave me the jitters, bcos it assumed the Americans had the right to invade Libya and kill any Libyan soldiers who stopped them in their mission to retrieve a satellite. If this is any reflection on public opinion, that's hugely scarey. So whilst we would like them to die quietly, could we stand the consequences of actively sending ppl out there to do them in?

And it also assumes that the person in question is purely doing it out of evil. But consider the PLO - they had a very real grievance, and their terrorism was motivated by principle, not by mere power-grabbing. Would Yasser Arafat have been a legitimate target? If so, where would that leave the Middle East now?

Grab.