After Saddam Hussein's forces were defeated in Iraq and driven from Kuwait, US and Allied leaders had a decision to make. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who victimized his own people and was proven to be willing to engage in warlike activities with neighboring nations. At the same time, the people of Iraq were divided along religious and ethnic lines. Without a strong leader, the country might devolve into chaos. US leaders decided to keep Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq with severe limits on Iraq's military. It was thought that the instability that might rise without a strong leader in Iraq was worse than Hussein's brutal rule. Put yourself in the difficult position of making the decision as to whether to remove a dictator from control of an unstable country. What arguments could be made for removing the dictator? What arguments could be made for keeping the dictator in power?

The reasons for removing a dictator from his leadership is the freedom in people's choices. It is a form of government in which one person or little group have absolute power without any constitutional limitations. This is the most important argument against a dictatorship and what causes suppression of basic civil liberties. Also, dictators usually use force and/or fraude to gain their political power and maintain it through intimidation.

However, to take the power off the dictator is a difficult thing because it usually it is happening in a weak social and political environment, which actually allows dictatorship to happen in the first place.

For this reason, we could name some of the arguments for keeping a dictator in power:

Whether we like it or not, this dictatorship somehow is holding the state together, so the intervention has to be well organized and study the social environment before the ending.

The intervention can cause a big chaos and a protracted conflict can lead, as in this specific case, into hundreds of thousands of deaths, massive migration, and widespread sectarian violence.

Of course the dictatorship is not a good option. The best way to end it has to contemplate possible new ways of organization, make sure how people will be leaded and how a new party is going to be elected in a representative way.

The only way which a dictator could keep in power would be in order to generate stability in a country which previous ways of government were chaotic and unequal and it does not provide safety to their citizen.

One of the most important argument to defeat a dictator is face the opportunity to defeat a government who violates individual freedoms and could reestablish credibility in front of the world.