@weeklystandard - Regime change isn’t an abstract and mad idea: It’s what the Iranian people have sought through massive protests in 2009 and again beginning last December, when popular protest hit cities and towns across the country. The continuing unrest, which has helped...
to produce a tidal wave of vitriol and dissension in the ruling elite, may have convulsed the regime’s internal nuclear deliberations. The only sensible approach towards the mullahs is to focus on this caldera of popular anger. 
Secretary Pompeo’s speeches on May 21 in #Washington and July 22 at the Reagan Library highlighted the plight of Iranians under theocracy—as well as any speech by any American official since the Islamic revolution has done—and set the stage for a coherent plan.
We need first 2better understand the past to see clearly why an American strategy to collapse Iran’s theocracy makes sense. Misreading Persian history has almost become de rigueur in Washington, on both left and the right. 2often Westerners have looked at #Iran as an island...
as an island of autocratic stability. This is even true today: Most American and European officials see the mullahs’ tools of repression as indomitable—just as they were for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The true story of Iran for much of the past century is, however, of a convulsive struggle between rulers wanting to maintain their prerogatives and the ruled seeking #freedom It is this volatile tug-of-war that will define not just the future of Iran but the #MiddleEast
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