Decapitation as Policy

I'm becoming increasingly non-interventionist, even Fortress Americanist, except in one respect:  how to deal with the really bad guys.

I guess Bid Laden  - The Final Chapter was what tipped me over on this.  For a long time I bought into the notion that assassination - not to put too fine a point on it - was bad policy.  Not sure why, but I guess the reason was that we wouldn't want them to do it to us.

But how about we put the bar high.  We don't intervene, much less assassinate, if the leader refrains from genocide and from actively working to murder innocent American civilians.  But if he does do either of these, we go kill 'm.

Then we don't stick around to try to make his state into Belgium.  We just say to the locals, here's why we did it.  We hope for the best for you.  Don't elect or anoint or empower another one who flunks one of these two tests or we will be back.  Otherwise, we won't.

And what if they apply the same standard to us?  I'm OK with that.  If we have a leader who commits genocide or plans the murder of innocent civilians of another country, and we don't take him out ourselves, I can bend a little on sovereignty.  Come and get him.