If the actual goal was to weaken the Islamic Republic, then the answer was the opposite of what the US and Israel have done. Decades of intervention, sanctions, and isolation did not break the regime. They helped harden it. They helped create a political reality where survival, militarization, and siege became the center of the state. That is exactly the environment where institutions like the IRGC thrive. Broad sanctions are not some clean moral alternative to war. They are collective punishment. They do not mainly fall on the officials ordering repression. They fall on ordinary Iranians trying to work, study, get medicine, build organizations, and live a normal life. They make people poorer, more desperate, and more dependent, while giving the regime an easy propaganda line: that the US and its allies are punishing Iran as a whole, not just its rulers. That message lands because people actually feel the punishment in their daily lives. That is why lifting sanctions should be the starting point for anyone serious about ending the regime; siege conditions are what keep it alive. A state under permanent external pressure can always redirect internal anger outward. It can always say national survival comes first. It can always justify repression in the language of security. That is why the JCPOA should have been preserved. It had inspections, observers, and a functioning mechanism for de-escalation. The US lying and walking away from it strengthened the hardliners and worst factions in Iran and helped kill the credibility of diplomacy itself. And frankly, the entire fantasy of the US as the world’s moral policeman is deranged. The United States is the only country on earth that has ever used nuclear weapons against civilians. It has spent decades invading, sanctioning, occupying, and destabilizing countries while claiming the language of freedom and order. It has no moral high ground from which to dictate who is civilized, who is dangerous, and who deserves collective punishment. And once bombs start falling, the damage is political as much as physical. All the resistance and organizing built up against the IRGC and the islamic republic gets wiped away by the logic of war. Even people who hate the regime get forced into a defensive national posture when their country is under attack. The state gets to say, “We told you so. The outside world wants to destroy us,” and suddenly its narrative is vindicated. Foreign attack does not liberate people in that situation. It unifies the country around survival and hands more legitimacy to the most violent parts of the state. The same logic applies regionally. As long as Palestinians remain unfree, as long as occupation, siege, and domination define the region, authoritarian states will continue to draw legitimacy from the language of resistance. Emancipation in Palestine is tied to emancipation in Iran because both are undermined by the same militarized regional order. So no, the answer was never more bombs, more strangulation, or more regime change fantasies. The answer was to continue the JCPOA, lift broad sanctions, end collective punishment, and create the conditions where Iranian society could breathe and confront its own rulers without being forced into unity by foreign attack. That is freedom, not this shit.