That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.

I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.

One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.

The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.

Iranian polls show that 20-25% Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change.

Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc).

The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.

Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).

The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.

This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.

The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.

Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.

What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.

> What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides.

Then they need to drive the rest out of the country, and then keep them out forever, regardless of whatever chaos, instability, and misery arise within the country.

Not really. Most people will just switch sides. There aren't that many people for whom fighting to the death with other Iranians is a goal. If the 10% can control the 90% today then the 90% will have no problem controlling the 10%.

I know you said to ignore historical precedent but I don't think what you're describing has happened anywhere, ever.

You can't build a stable, prosperous country with remnants of a former regime periodically showing up at people's doors holding guns and telling them that they're now part of a resistance movement.

Do you know many people that live in Iran today? You're making bold claims about their loyalty and aspirations, though if that's first or second hand I'd be very interested to hear more.

Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal.

Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it.

The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.

The UK population was _very_ weary of Churchill and his decision to involve the UK in WW2. You had the UK nazi party that was lobbying the industrialists, and the moscow-aligned communist party that was putting pressure on the laborers. Churchill would have lasted at most half a year after Dunkerque, and and much more pro-nazi PM could have been named. But the German airstrike campaign radicalised the UK population. Because the fucking Nazis couldn't bear to have decisions like 'who to bomb' taken by non-nazi, they replaced all the capable men with idiots yesmen.

So 90% of British wanted were being brutally oppressed on the eve of WW2 and called on the Nazis to bomb the UK so they can overthrow the government? Not only that but weeks before the Nazi attacks the UK government mowed down protestors with machine guns on the streets?

Got it.

I'm not seeing any parallels.

There can be some "rally to the flag" effect but the Iranian population by large is not going to suddenly like their government.

But to turn the story around a little. Do you see Americans rallying around Trump if the Iranians attack some high profile US targets?

No. 80% of the British wanted to avoid war with Germany, for different reasons, and 15% even voted for someone whose main campaign idea was an alliance with them. The bombing campaign radicalised the vast majority of British voters, even those in less affected areas.

(Btw, the only recent documented instance of machine gun mowing down people is Saudi police mowing down Somali workers).

60% of the Iranian population polled were against the bombing during the 12 day war, bombing that, unlike this one, didn't break too much civilian infrastructure (targeting desalination plants is something I thought even Russia wouldn't do, but well, I shouldn't hold US army and Tsahal to the same standards). And that's with most observers saying that only 20-25% of the population support the regime in 'normal' time.

You had thousands dead, 50k people in prison waiting for the death penalty, a leader on his deathbed, and rather than waiting for the internal tensions between army branches to break the regime, the US chose to martyr the almost dead, suffering leader, consolidating his successor power, and eliminating and opposition in the more laical army. Nice fucking job. Now the army and the clerical police are aligned.

Even when you organize and plan correctly a regime change, a few unlucky breaks and you create a Lybia. Going there gung-ho was truly a spectacular choice, and managed to put Komenei son in place without any power struggles that could have been instrumentalized.