If the regime survives, now Iranian people have a very good reasons to ignore its shortcomings and tyranny and Do a proper sacrifice. It’s a natural resources rich nation of 90 million people. If they want to get serious, they can get serious.
More to it, I've had personal experience with this brutal regime, they arrested my old cousin during the Mahsa Protests(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests), she was taken to the Evin prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison) and was tortured for 6 months. We had no news from her. When she was finally released, she was so skinny that you could see her rib bones. We managed to bring her to Canada and it took her over a year of medical care until she began to recover. She was only 20.
No one hates this regime more than Iranians.
With all that out of the way, Iranians have no choice now but the defend their homes against hostile forces. They will not simply sit back and watch Israel and United States bomb their land to oblivion and then demand unconditional surrender.
This attack will inflict more pain on Iranians and only serves to grow the regime stronger.
We wanted a regime change, but not at the hands of Israel and US.
Honest question, do Iranians want foreign help for regime change? If so, what would be the nature of this help?
You've had decades to change the regime and you didn't do it. If not now, when?
I cannot. Ground occupation, yes. But afaict bombing just reinforces the regime.
The Iranian regime is very centralized and with Israel and the USA having air superiority and having penetrated it completely from an intelligence perspective (see Israel's perfect knowledge of the whereabouts of the previous chief of staff and the newly appointed chief of staff) it's going to be very hard for it to survive if a decision is made to remove it. There are a handful of key people that once gone there is not going to be any continuity.
The current regime is allowed to continue because of fear of chaos if it is removed, not because there isn't a capability to remove it.
Again, no bombing campaigns led to a change of regime. This theory is proven again and again
Regardless, a sovereign country was bombed tonight just because they can. This, IMHO, can have very bad outcomes for the peace worldwide since it means that anybody who can bomb someone can just go ahead and do it. No more international order.
What's next then? Bomb Brussels because EU doesn't buy chicken from USA? This stuff isn't OK.
The regime change in Iran can be a silver lining if it changes with something more cooperative. But yes, I agree that this is unlikely.
From what I gathered from OSINT types, they have breached the ventilation shafts above the centrifuge halls
The dictatorial nature of Trump's order to attack a nation is far more concerning. Supposedly the US requires an act of Congress to authorize this sort of operation. Sidestepping congress underlines US's descent into totalitarianism and one of the very first acts crystalizing a dictatorship.
IRGC isn’t a sovereign country, it’s a designated terrorist organization
You forgot that IRGC already directly attacked Israel twice in 2024 [1,2], and that’s not including countless proxy attacks and terrorist acts, culminating in October 7th massacres & atrocities
You got it wrong: IRGC attacked and Israel retaliated
US is just helped a little bit their ally
> This stuff isn't OK.
UN, ICC, ICG, etc. all became a $hit show, they don’t work. For 40 years IRGC threatened with Genocide of Jews, and they did nothing. Now when Jews retaliated: * This stuff isn't OK.* ;)
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1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Iranian_strikes...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2024_Iranian_strikes_o...
The key element is where the will of the people points - Milosevic was already unpopular and the bombing further united the people against him.
The few Iranians I know are against the regime, but I don't know how the wider picture looks.
Many of them still look at the Iran-Iraq war with a shade of Iranian patriotism (not sure there's a word to capture that actual feeling of sad memories of losing family members, coupled with a patriotic sense of duty).
The younger generation, not so much, since they didn't have to live through that hell.
my experience with Iranians I know are the same. the regime is not partitularly liked by the Iranians but they are no doubt united behind him now because (and for good reason) they likely believe whoever the israelis would appoint as the leader of Iran would be categorically worse.
A lot of Americans deeply oppose Trump, but how many of them would support a Chinese invasion with the express objective of overthrowing him and installing a new regime? I suspect very few, and instead you'd probably get a backlash of support for Trump.
Japan.
Perhaps forcing regime changes on other countries shouldn't be a quick decision.
Just recently Trump tried to troll the Germany’s leader for it and only got a “Thank you for defeating us”.
The truth is that Iran’s regime is indeed a very shitty one and a lot of people have grievances with it but the problem is, this is about Israel and they are not any better and didn’t stand at a higher moral ground with their illegal occupation and actions that many consider genocidal.
Relative to their last, America-backed regime? I don't think you're looking at this from an Iranian perspective at all.
and a war that killed 400,000 Americans.
You want to repeat that history?
This is more likely to be the end of the American empire than an actual change in Iran.
It is also completely unnecessary. There are two options. Either the current regime makes a "deal" or it's going to get crippled to the point of irrelevance or removed.
Iran and Iraq are very different. Different culture, people and history. It's also worth remembering Iran is not homogeneous, only 61% of the population are Persians. There are Azeri, there are Kurds and various other ethnic/region minorities.
Iran is extremely vulnerable. It has internal issues, constantly oppressing/suppressing its people. Its economy is in terrible shape. Most of its economic engine can be easily taken out (its main oil terminals). The bulk of its military can be destroyed from the air, it has little defensive or offensive capability. They know it.
There are much much softer targets than Tel Aviv, many of which Iran has successfully attacked in the past.
The argument that the Iranian people hate their autocratic government might be correct. But a symmetric argument can be made about many of the regimes which work with the United States. No one in those countries is going to war with Iran to defend the US right to have military bases in the Middle East.
Say you give the Kurds their own part of Iran and help protect their area could weaken the rest. I think there is already such a deal in in Iraq afaik.
how are you gonna do that without boots on the ground?
Trump talking about annexing canada made them go from being sick of the liberal party becuase of trudeau to swinging back around to supporting it to an upset victory because they were the only ones standing up to america. and thats america's closest ally, iran is their most bitter foe
this is either gonna end any chance of cooling things off with iran (and make them realize they need a nuclear deterrent yesterday), or turn into another vietnam/afghanistan
the regime was unpopular, the US could have collapsed them slowly like they did the soviets, but instead they let israel's "trust me bro" on nukes pull them into another quagmire.
Does it have the political will? No way!
Michael Shurkin-- a former rand analyst and I strongly recommend his podcast-- says that politicians say "there is no military solution" when they mean there is no military solution that people would politically support. The US could do all sorts of things in Iran but the US people would not accept the casualties or the human rights abuses.
You think we need to occupy them? This isn't Iraq.
I would be shocked if there were 50 million atheists in America. Maybe if you included people who are spiritual but do not believe directly in a god. Maybe I could accept it then, but at that point, you are stretching the definition of 'atheist' to its breaking point.
This is a stupid war being waged by idiots against idiots . Unfortunately none of those idiots calling the shots will die, it'll be a bunch of kids who just made the mistake of not being rich and powerful enough.
Is this, in your mind, how empires end? I'm not sure if you've cracked a history book in a while, but immigrants built this country. We are a country of immigrants. We win when we get the hardest working, most entrepreneurial, boldest and smartest people to come here. Immigrants are no couch potatoes - on average they work harder than American born citizens do by an order of magnitude for way less pay.
That is literally the ultimate ambition of this war.
There's a long list of middle eastern countries where we've installed our stooges.
So they want to either change the regime or change the regime, and don't much care which one?
If one were really concerned about the Iranians, the first thing they'd hope for is the containment of radiation not a revolution.
That's not to endorse any of these regimes, including the current Iranian one, just saying the variance is enormous around these events.
I'm wondering whether Trump knows that Iran won't give up and nevertheless pushes forward, or does he really believe that Iran can surrender? I think that's 99.99999% wrong belief. It feels like he is expressing it only to cover up his actions. He probably knows this will lead to a long-term escalation, but thinks that's the right thing to do for the interests of groups/countries he cares about.
