Whether the Iranians were close to making a nuke or not, by itself a strike against their “nuke factories” was necessary. Iran under the ayatollah has shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted. (So much for following the teachings of Islam!) What comes in the aftermath of the US attack is another matter. (In Iran or the region. AOC’s call to impeach Trump for this action is absurd!) But will we only solidify Iran’s role as the free world’s worst enemy? (North Korea, China, and Russia are obvious competitors.)
Let’s turn the clock back to the 1950s: Iran had just elected a Marxist government (note the emphasis on “elected”!) and its prime minister wanted to nationalize the country’s petroleum industry. British Petroleum stood to lose the billions they’d invested to exploit Iranian oil and rob the Iranian people. The Brits asked the US to intervene. (Of course! They did that a lot. They caused havoc throughout the Third World defending the remnants of their colonial empire, which included fighting American patriots during our revolution, of course–America was a Third World nation at that time, and our current president is returning it to that state.) The US agreed to do the dirty deed…and installed a puppet government led by the Shah who became a cruel dictator. In other words, we got a regime change, replacing a democracy with a dictatorship! Another revolution soon occurred as the Iranian people replaced the Shah with the ayatollahs in the so-called “Islamic Revolution,” a takeover by religious fanatics (who violate the Koran all the time!), One can argue that the Islamic Republic [a big 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 imperialist American governments’ atrocities that justified its actions of overthrowing governments it didn’t like as democracy fighting 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 has 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 their Yankee-supported evil regimes. (This is all 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 doesn’t set well with a country’s citizens. (Nor should it! 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 as a major exploiter.)
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 nukes!) What occurs next will be key. Will there be cyberattacks? Electrical grid and infrastructure attacks? More shootings at public events carried out by Iranian sleeper cells or other sympathizers? Anything is possible with fanatics in charge in Iran. But let’s leave regime change to the Iranian people. The current regime has only about 20% of the support of Iranians. (That’s most likely increased with the US attack!) Let them come up with their own alternative to the current evil regime. The third try might even give them democracy. If they’re not ready for that, their country will become just another poor country of the Third World, joining all the other failures of history, many caused by the West.
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