303Bear said:
Oldbear83 said:
" So when is this internal uprising of disaffected and oppressed Iranian going to rise up and take back the country?"
To coin a phrase. that's not how this works.
The hardliners who ran Iran since 1979 made sure there would be no one to oppose them domestically. Other Muslim parties were purged, and secular leaders were expelled or purged wherever found. Ironically similar to Communists, the Islamic Republican Party itself (which brought the Ayatollah into Iran) was destroyed in 1987 to eliminate any possible rival to the Ayatollah.
Article 110 of Iran's constitution gives the Supreme Leader power to name the Guardian Council, who in turn name the Assembly of Experts, who in turn name the new Supreme Leader when the former dies. Iran does not have elections for the Supreme Leader.
Over the years, student groups originally founded to show devotion to theocracy have evolved to dissident groups demanding power to some degree. The Republican Guard has been unable to suppress them completely, and these groups show up from time to time, such as the Arab Spring in 2009, 2011, and of course now.
A number of parties are active in Iran now, including the National Front, the Constitutionalist Party, the Tudeh Party, People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas (IPFG), Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and the Qashqai Freedom Path Party(QAYI).
None of these groups is particularly pro-US, but a number of them have been receiving US aid because they help provide intelligence information on Iran conditions, and because it serves the US interest for the Ayatollahs to have internal dissent.
The most likely 'good' outcome in Iran for the near future would likely include restoration of elections, and multiple political parties in Iran, even those which publicly oppose the US, because it would weaken unity of action in Iran. The US has made quiet deals in the past with regimes which disavowed supporting US goals, while de facto doing so.
If overthrow and change of regime are the goal (as I have heard from a number of sources, including this board), why are you talking about the succession mechanisms in the current Iranian constitution? This succession has happened several times since we began bombing and the regime, as it were, is still very much in power.
We were told in January that there were millions in the streets ready to remove the Islamist government, and if we just would strike the top and remove the leaders, there could be another revolution. We have been doing that for over a month now and there has been no movement toward replacement of the governmental system or an overthrow. So was January exaggerated, or is there really not an organized opposition beyond protesting and the best we can hope for is a power vacuum where the most brutal will end up being the replacement?
If the alternate groups are still not pro-America (and we know they aren't pro-Israel), then what are we doing at all that we could not have accomplished by further strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities? Why do we need to bomb them "back to the Stone Age"? If we replace bad with slightly less bad, what did we actually accomplish? Especially if there is the chance to destabilize the religion and have an even more hardline, anti-west group rise up in its place (as ISIS did for a time in parts of Iraq and Syria)? How does the US benefit from that long term? Israel is using this as an opportunity to push into Hezbollah controlled areas to secure their own territory and increase land area (though the campaign seems to be going worse than they anticipated so far), so if we go boots on the ground, it looks like we will go alone.
I am and will remain completely opposed to that.
Your post seemed to respond to something other than my actual post, so I am not sure whether you are confused or simply reacting in emotion.
I
do agree that a ground invasion of Iran is not feasible, but I believe all the talk about that is part of concealing our
actual plans. Strange in a way to see how many people think everything that shows up in media reflects our real intentions.
To the main question of changing the regime in Iran, that both cannot be done, and can. I know it's in
vogue to consider Trump an ignorant and emotional fool, but his first term showed a better sense of reality and valid options than we saw going back to 9/11. Trump certainly is aware of how occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan worked out. A US occupation of Iran would meet fierce resistance on many levels, and would damage relations with other ME nations. Also, there are at this time no national elections in Iran for any real position of authority, so anything like a secular regime would have to be built from the dirt up.
I believe Pakistan and Algeria are possible models for building a stable, almost-trustworthy government in Teheran. That would require
sub rosa negotiations, which I believe have been going on for some years already, which would include stakeholders from other nations. Israel would not be part of such negotiations; the US would deal privately with Israel's concerns.
Most of the real negotiations would never see the news. We would only see the results later, and the critics - if they noticed at all - would mutter that we just got lucky.