The status quo in Iran isn’t going well either; the economy is terrible and getting worse, and the government is slaughtering its own citizens.
we could always stop punishing the people of Iran for their government...
The world doesn't revolve around the West. Nobody in America caused the IRGC to engineer a water crisis. Nobody asked for them to murder students in an internet-connected age, like the single thing you do not do if you want to calm things down.
Sanctions have made Iranians poorer. But so has their gerontocratic theocracy pursuing autarky and misguided nuclear ambitions at any cost. Khamenei can't hold open elections because he knows he'd lose.
They're either our allies, aren't pursuing nuclear weapons and/or aren't actively destabilising everything in their vicinity.
America calling for regime change in the Middle East is fraught, and I'm honestly not yet on board with direct action (though that's about as influential as what shade the moon is tonight). But Iran is "uniquely bad." It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.
Iran hasn't had a direct conflicr with anyone but Iraq and Israel in the last fifty years, last I checked, and the conflict with Israel was in response to unproved aggression.
If you're talking proxy wars, how are Iran's proxies any worse than UAE's, or Turkey's, or the Saudi's? And Israel has certainly been orders of magnitude more destabilizing.
I'm entirely unconvinced.