As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against your opponents best weapons and you have to be smarter than that.

Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.

It's a nonsense assumption that you can get rid of terrorism with war. Terrorism is taking the lives of innocent people to gain your objective. War is basically the same thing on a larger scale.

Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule.

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

Violence by the defenders will be used by the putschists to justify overwhelming repression which they want to use anyhow. It will be used to CLAIM that the putschists are saving the country from ‪‎terrorism or ‪#civil war‬, and are preserving "‪law‬ and ‪‎order‬

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.