binkThere's no doubt what's happening in Iran is a massacre by a dictatorial regime, but good grief the parallels between the rhetoric now and that of 2003 are impossible to ignore. I thought we had moved past the idea that the US could just bomb a country into a better future.
But unfortunately it does sometimes work, for example in Yugoslavia. And it would have worked in Iraq if we hadn't dismantled the entire civilian infrastructure.
what on earth could you mean by it working in yugoslavia
The killing in Bosnia and Kosovo were stopped by Bill Clinton. The bombings were what brought all sides to the table to broker the Dayton agreement. The siege of Sarajevo ended. The peace has held for nearly 30 years now.
OK, but this was more like Serbia/Kosovo/Bosnia.
Maybe GP was asking about previous Yugoslavia war, where AFAIR there was no intervention and massacres continued for quite long.
Whether or not we have, this probably has more to do with bombing the huge, late night Friday Epstein files dump off the front page.
I doubt there will be a ground invasion this time. The current US administration cannot build a coalition (and logistics without a coalition is hard), not will the US public go for it.
And is there really much you can do from the air that wasn't done already?
Either the Iranians do it themselves or it doesn't happen. Sadly, I don't see any good outcomes for the protestors. But you never know, oppressive regimes appear stable, until they are not.
There definitely won't be boots on the ground and that's kinda the point. Even if we had boots on the ground there's no guarantee that the US getting involved will make things better for the people of the region. We couldn't deliver democracy for Afghanistan after two decades but there are still people who think we'll be greeted as liberators in Iran and we'll be able to claim "mission accomplished" after a few months.
I don't think there'll be boots on the ground either but Iran isn't Afghanistan or Iraq, both of which were essentially failed states with minimal state capacity riven with internal armed conflict and ethnic tension. There's ethnic tension everywhere, including in Iran, but Iran has at its core an extraordinarily functional and coherent society.
I don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instigated). "We'll be greeted as liberators" was trotted out as a mitigation for how bad occupations normally are, but we were going whether or not that was true. The Iraq war was not a war of liberation against an unjust government. It was a war of choice against a country that happened to have a horrendously unjust government.
The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.