The politics of personal destruction

So why can't we just kill guys like Ahmedinijad and Saddam instead of invading their country and doing a bunch of innocent people in the process in order to depose them, not to mention a huge amount of infrastructure? Destroy the person, not the infrastructure.

You actually think that we didn't want to destroy Iraqi's infrastructure? Are you really that retarded?

>>2
Gee so we wanted to cause constant blackouts and give the Iraqis only 5 hours of electricity a day? Wow arent we nice!

If you go to war on the premise that you’re helping the people of Iraq (which is and always will be the final justification) then it’s absurd to only kill Saddam, as it would only result in more violence and hardship for the common Iraqi.

No. It's a compromise between making it totally shit for them (infrastructure destruction) and getting rid of their dictator, which the neocons wanted to do anyway.

>>1
Assassination of heads of state is not a useful political tool.  Part of this stems from the fact that killing leaders can lead to martyrdom, and usually merely creates a vacuum for the next evil scumfuck to take power.  It does not address root causes.  Also, there has throughout history been an unwritten law against assassination of state leaders; they all agree not to assassinate eachother (or at least not without masking the source extremely well).

The US can't (legally) assassinate political leaders.  Gerald Ford signed an executive order back in the 70s prohibiting it.  He felt, as did most of the Presidents after him, that it's simply counterproductive, especially when an attempt fails (see: Castro).

In the case of Saddam, his assassination would simply have put his even-more-insane sons in power.  If by some miracle we got his sons at the same time, Iraq would have turned into what it is right now--only without even a semblance of a stable government.

In the case of Ahmedinijad, his assassination would not change Iranian policy (Ayatollah Khamenei makes policy, NOT Ahmedinijad), and it would provide even more proof to the fundamentalist nuts that the USA is the great satan.

No, you people don't understand. It's an application of the golden rule. No leader wants to be killed, so he doesn't try to kill others. Once one of them began doing it everyone would and all sorts of shit would break out that would backfire on whoever started.