Looks like the war with Iran is cooking off

[Ninurta]

Most other major world religions have gone through a reformation of some sort, in other words, they have moved with the times. Islam is the one religion that hasn't, even though there was a glimer of it pre 1978/1979.
 The bigest mistake in all this, and a "putting the cart before the horse" was Trump saying "help is on the way"..... and then did nothing.
So, around 40,000 Persians rose up and were slaughtered by the Iranian regime.
Any remaining Persians will be keeping their heads down, as they are.
Trump and Pahlavi lost 40,000 people, who would still be alive to bring about the regime change against the IRGC, if he'd acted on his words. He should have mobilised before he said "help is on its way".
The 40,000 deaths are on both their heads.
Rainbows
Jane

I think he was probably caught flat-footed and unprepared when the discontent boiled over and the protests started. It takes time to move a military force into a specific region if it's not already there, and I think they may have miscalculated how long it would be before they were really ready for it. Trump and Pahlavi said what they did so that the momentum of the protestors would not be lost and they would keep on the pressure, but as you say, they said it a bit too early, with too long a gap between the declaration of help and the actual help arriving.

I can't fault the Iranians for keeping their heads down now. The regime has demonstrated a huge willingness to massacre it's own people, and those people are for the most part entirely unarmed, still, and so it is a lopsided fight. For the regime, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, because fish in a barrel can neither escape nor shoot back.

Arms and ammunition need to be dropped in to the population poste haste. In perhaps another case of getting the cart before the horse, the US and Israel are providing air support now, taking out checkpoints and knots of IRGC / Basij militia in Tehran, but air support is less effective without an armed populace to provide ground pressure. Conversely, the ground pressure is less effective without air support. They sort of go hand-in-hand.

On the other hand, the IRGC is pretty much devoid of air support now on it's own, so getting arms to the people might be more effective than the air support being provided to a disarmed populace even in the absence of that air support. It would be a ground fight versus a ground fight, and whomever was the miost determined would win... and the iranians seem to be pretty determined, if they were willing to give up 40,000 of their own number even unarmed.

So, really, I think it's past time to arm them up. There is only so much that Kurdish militias can accomplish on their own, and they seem to be the only people other than ISIS who are currently armed against the regime. That armed core needs to be expanded upon sooner rather than later, or we will find ourselves in another case of the horse pushing the cart instead of pulling it.

American ground troops are not the answer. An armed Iranian population IS the answer. The only answer American ground troops provide is to the question "how do you generate a quagmire in Iran?"

I know we have 2500 US Marines steaming on their way, but that is not enough for a ground invasion - it's just enough to get a bunch of Marines killed. We already have the "troops" in place and on-site in Iran in the form of the Iranian population. All they need is a means to fight, because they've already got a reason to.

That's why the Soviets won the "revolution" in 1978/79. They just armed up the "students", then could afford to stand back and watch as those armed students took down a regime and ushered in an era of Islamic repression that has lasted 47 years.

Those same Soviets, at about the same time,, and right next door in Afghanistan also demonstrated the futility of sending in their own troops to support their "Revolution" in Afghanistan. That had the opposite effect - in Afghanistan, at the same time, the Soviet invasion generated a quagmire that the Soviets could not extract themselves from for 10 long years of death and destruction. That Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan had no small effect on the collapse of the Soviet Empire at the end of their occupation there, and the regime they supported from afar in Iran at the self-same time has outlasted the Soviet Empire by 35 years.

It's not hard maths to do, really, when we have concrete examples of what works and what doesn't in the region.

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