Whether the Iranians were close to making a nuke or not, by itself a strike against their “nuke factories” was required. Iran under the ayatollah has shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted. What comes in the aftermath is another matter. (AOC’s call to impeach Trump for this is absurd!) But will we only solidify Iran’s role as the free world’s worst enemy? (North Korea, China, and Russia are their competitors.)
Let’s turn the clock back to the 1950s: Iran had just elected a Marxist government (note the emphasis on “elected”!) and its leader wanted to nationalize the country’s petroleum industry. British Petroleum stood to lose the billions they’d invested to exploit Iranian oil. The Brits asked the US to intervene. (The Brits did that a lot. They caused havoc throughout the world defending the remnants of their colonial empire, which included fighting American patriots during our revolution.) The US agreed to do the dirty deed for them…and installed a puppet government led by the Shah, who in turn became a cruel dictator. In other words, we got a regime change, replacing a democracy with a dictatorship! Another regime change soon occurred as the Iranian people replaced the Shah with the ayatollahs in their “Islamic Revolution.” One can argue that the Islamic Republic [sic] is much worse than the Shah’s regime, and this evil theocracy has endured much longer!
This chain of events was nothing new and set the tone for the imperialist American government justifying its actions of overthrowing governments it didn’t like as democracy fighting against tyranny, mostly socialist and communist regimes, a campaign headed by America’s own fascists at the CIA that schemed with right-wing and autocratic elements in Afghanistan. Chile, Iraq, Panama, Vietnam…the list of overthrown governments kept growing, many of them freely elected by those countries’ citizens. The US, supposedly a champion for democracy, installed evil dictators and autocratic regimes and then buoyed them up when things got dicey, i.e., a country’s citizens rebelled against the Yankee-supported regimes. (This is all well documented in Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow, a classic expose of US duplicity.)
At the very least, these examples consistently show that regime change doesn’t work even if it’s achieved because installing a puppet government subservient to US interests often doesn’t set well with a country’s citizens. (Even with Hawaii, among the forced regime changes considered in Kinzer’s book, it took years for things to settle down, and Dole Pineapple still prevailed.)
Let’s give our fascist president and his minions some credit, though: They’re not talking about regime change…yet. They said they only wanted to end Iran’s bomb-making efforts. (Can you imagine a nuke in the hands of an Islamic jihadist? I cringe when I even think of Trump controlling our nukes!) What occurs next, the so-called aftermath, is key. Will there be cyberattacks? Electrical grid and infrastructure attacks? More shootings at public events and schools carried out by members of Iran’s sleeper cells? Anything is possible with fanatics in charge of Iran.
But let’s leave regime change to the Iranian people. The current regime has only about 20% of the support of Iranians. Let them come up with their own alternative to the current evil regime. The third try might even give them a democracy. If they’re not ready for that, their country will become just another poor country in the Third World, joining all the other failures of history.
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