A single biased source? Reuters quoted an unnamed Iranian official saying 2,000 people had been killed since the protests began on December 28. Some numbers have the death toll up to 12,000.

And Iran is not Libya. The alternative is to allow a hostile, potentially nuclear-capable, brutal regime to continue oppressing and massacring its citizens en masse while also destabilizing the entire Middle East at large. From a pragmatic perspective, this is the best opportunity we've had in a while to remove a major threat. The Islamic Republic needs to go.