Sam Lowry said: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.
What happened in January was that a few thousand CIA/Mossad stooges went around committing terrorist acts and trying to incite chaos until they got taken out. If we were running a halfway competent regime change operation, that would have been the time for US forces to attack. Now we seem to be making it up as we go along.
I largely dismissed that line of thinking a few months ago, but it seems more and more plausible as this conflict goes on. We have done what was "begged" of us to do just 6-8 weeks prior to the first strikes, yet there has been no popular movement to change the government from within. So far there has been 0 evidence an internal group with any size or influence is emerging to try and fill any power vacuum created by the bombing of the heads of government.
And I don't see how destroying power, transportation and other infrastructure helps our cause. Maybe long term the people turn against the government in an attempt to stop the bombs falling, but it is a stretch to believe they would immediately embrace the source of the bombs as well.
