As an Iranian in the West who has a family of Shia mulsims, what Westerners don't understand is that the sectarians _pray_ for death..
It's difficult for someone on this forum to fathom how anyone would _want to die_, but that's how these guys operate. Killing Khamenei did nothing but to grant him exactly what he wanted. He was martyred at the hands of the enemy during the holy month of Ramadan. He had already delegated all his operations and stayed home, waiting for bombs to drop.
Assassinating him simply poured more gasoline to the fire. Decapitating extremist leadership doesn't achieve much (as we just witnessed), you can't kill an ideology like this with guns.
The other thing that I'll mention is about 30% of the population in Iran supports IRGC and within those 30%, at least _half_ of them are willing to die for the cause. in a country of 90M, that's millions of people..
So unless you're going to conduct a genocide, you're not killing all of them, and even if you do, the few that remain will grow again.
United States did a great job exporting liberalism to Iran over the past 40 years and some of those ideas were starting to take shape. However I feel like now they undid all that work and united all IRGC supporters because of the war.
I think TRUMP miscalculated Iranian's abilities to take over the regime. The diaspora celebrating Iran getting bombed are out of touch with the reality of the country.
As a rule - I disregard the opinions of the diaspora. It's nothing personal but often they are often the least informed and most biased when speaking about any given homeland.
As a rule you disregard the opinions of refugees because you think they are the least informed on the topic that has intense personal impact on them and their families? WTF?
What do you think the prospect is of those 15% successfully stopping the secession of Balochistan and Kurdistan? Not a trick question, I'm genuinely curious.
