Be afraid, be very afraid.

As an aside: Iran is one of the youngest nations on earth. The government threatening is one thing. Most of the younger Iranians were sympathetic to the West. It was only a matter of time before the regime would be gone or at least soften. But when you bomb a country that generally tends to cause a rally-round-the flag effect (see Britain in WWII, for example). So we've probably blown our chance at rapprochement for quite a while. The regime can tell it's citizens "see, we warned you about America, the Great Satan! "

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mhb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This talk of the "rally-round-the-flag" effect is uninformed speculation since very little is exiting the country. Would they also have rallied around the flag if these same actions were taken when the initial protests occurred? It's not at all clear that the Iranians would ever be able to throw off their tyrannical government without outside help.

There is no rapprochement with people whose goal is to kill you and who don't mind so much if they die while trying.

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UncleOxidant 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, there certainly isn't any chance if you assume that everyone in Iran wants to kill you. But when you realize that it's only a small minority of people who were saying this then you start to ask: what about the majority of the people who were either sympathetic to the West or even just apathetic? Their government saying "Death to America" is like Trump saying "We're going to bomb them back to the stone age!" - most of us don't agree with Trump and we don't want any part of "bombing them back to the stone age". Same in Iran: most Iranians didn't agree with "death to America". But when you give them reason to agree with that sentiment it makes it harder for anything to actually change.

	▲	mhb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Their government saying "Death to America" is like Trump saying "We're going to bomb them back to the stone age!" The only way these things are alike is not useful. It's true that they both said things. But everyone understands that, even though Trump is a reckless idiot, he is saying bellicose things during a military offensive; not that he plans to annihilate Iran with nuclear weapons. The people in charge of Iran who are acquiring nuclear weapons actually intend to use them. Besides the nuclear weapons, the quantity of conventional weapons they are stockpiling is an existential threat to Israel. I'm going to give the Iranians credit for understanding that the intention of the US is to mitigate the threat that its autocracy poses to other countries. But it doesn't really matter. They can't be allowed to develop nuclear weapons or pose an existential threat to Israel. Neither of those aims was going to be accomplished waiting for some sort of sea change effected by an unarmed citizenry oppressed by a ruthless regime.