Will this result in bloody civil war like in Iraq and minimal dysfunctional central government after?
I agree with others here that regime really needs to go but I of course share your fear of what could happen to Iran once the central government is weakened. Currently there are multiple tiers of special forces keeepinf various groups in check, however once this is gone, things could get ugly.
I worry about my family living there, we have been having a hard time time reaching there since the attacks started and there is no way of telling what is going to happen next.
I do not think it would be to the benefit of people who live in Iran, even if they were Christian, to live through the bombings and mass destruction of the proposed war in exchange for life under US territorial administration, which has not been very good historically.
But an American occupation isn't even on the table. Nobody is interested in that. The most anyone wants at the moment is for the US to drop a MOAB on fordo and mop up the rest of Irans military from the air.
Yes.
> The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off.
That is mad talk. Things have been much worse, so much worse for almost everyone in and around Iraq since that war.
ISIS for one thing, was a direct result of the perfidious actions of foreigners in Iraq.
So much chaos was created, there is no way the invasion of Iraq improved the world
For an average individual going about their day, lack of political freedom is a 100x better option than lack of food or security that Iraq (or Libya or Afghanistan) went through.
I couldn't agree with you more. I can think of at least one excellent example of this.
But in the case of Iraq there is no question in my mind that deposing saddam was the right thing to do.
If anything the person i was replying to was lecturing op, apparently an actual Iranian, about why American involvement is bad for him.
The clerics are a paper tiger. Their domestic support base has been almost fully eroded. The Islamic Revolution had proclaimed the hijab as a cause célèbre; today, Iranians generally ignore it when the government isn't looking, after decades of protest and suppression.
But the Iranian military controls a vast amount of the country's economy (by comparison to normal countries) and retains popular support as an opponent of the West. It won't go quietly, and Israel lacks the resources and the United States lacks the will to dismantle it, which anyway would be a Herculean undertaking and cost millions of innocent lives. Military dictatorships are usually pragmatic on social issues, economically protectionist, and politically repressive — making the hypothetical new Iran look more like China's ideal ally than America's.
The most likely vector of regime change is a military coup that produces a government which sues for peace. They may agree to dismantle the nuclear program, but there will be a sense of "for now", and they will cultivate alliances with an eye to protection from the West. We may then see real nuclear weapons in Iran, but with red flags and yellow stars on them, instead of the imaginary nuclear weapons that were invented to keep Bibi out of prison.
That bloody civil requires resources from somewhere, so a bi geopolitical power with interests in that chaos is necessary
I take my chances for a probable dysfunctional government rather than a definitely dysfunctional one.
Hostile foreign countries are however much more likely to pour resources into fomenting a revolution if you have nukes as this would avoid conventional warfare which has the potential to escalate to the point of nuclear deployment.
In the context of Iran vs. North Korea which this discussion is in reference to, Iran is very likely to fall from internal forces which overwhelmingly disapprove of the government, compared to North Korea which seemingly has overwhelming support from its people, and has been cut off from the rest of the world since before the Internet was available.
It's unlikely another country will ever be capable of instituting the same degree of isolationism that North Korea has, owing to the prevalance of internet-capable devices everywhere else in the world. And honestly I don't think the North Korean government would have survived as long as it had without this policy.
You don't need to guess as to what happens; there are examples.
I hear tickets to Libya are cheap lately. You can visit and compare.