A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern.
For as long as I’ve been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.
Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose their system on others.” His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been “lashed together by occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own people.” Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.” George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein’s government “practices terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said “he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people.”
