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Comment by gotwaz | Hacker News Reader

Iran already has a lot of issues. If the regime does collapse over night ala Soviets/Arab Spring by just making some mistake while reacting to all this pressure, I dont look forward to the amount of gloating Trump and Netanyahu are going to do.

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I learned recently that there’s a deep public disgust of US meddling in Iranian self-determination going back to the 50s. I don’t know how the public feels about Israel but I’m guessing it’s not popular. The people wanted change but I suspect there’s consensus “not like this.”

The regime has been decapitated and it lives on. They planned for this for decades and built a resistant decentralized command structure.

Their army survived the first shock and is now engaged in a decentralized gorilla conflict (as they always planned) and everyone knows how that ends. (When US gives up without accomplishing anything and goes away)

My point was the regime may collapse for other reasons. Just like the USSR. There was no dearth of plans there and no lack of effort of US trying to destablize them.

Didn’t the USSR collapse because Gorbachev was an idealist who actually wanted the best for his country

The modern autocracies barely even pay lip service to such ideas

In fairness, the USSR autocrats before Gorbachev barely paid lip service to it too...

That's fair, it's unfortunate for them that they didn't consider that Gorbachev was being earnest when he spouted the party line

Trump has done them a favor by creating a generation of Iranian patriots who put their anti-fundamentalism at a lower priority than their disgust at the US and Israel.

They also have the support of Russia/China and a regime willing to massacre kids to stay in power

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