The Problem in Iran
I am not going to get into any ethical or legal arguments about the decapitation raids on Iran. I don't have the time or the heart to do it right now. I couldn't be more thrilled to see the leadership of Iran eliminated but the legal basis for all this is slim. Of course every President this century has done something similar, sometimes with far less provocation, so the precedent train already left the station long ago. I will, however, offer one practical issue.
The US is really good at getting rid of leaders like this, and if anything is getting better. I won't go further back than my lifetime, but the Diem coup (and execution) in South Vietnam, the lukewarm (at best) support for the Shah of Iran that contributed to his ouster, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion, Gaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Noriega in Panama -- the list goes on. But in many or most of these cases, what followed the US-led decapitation was as bad or worse than what came before. Vietnam - equally bad or worse. Iran - worse. Iraq - better but took a really long commitment. Afghanistan - at least as bad or worse. Venezuela - unknown but no immediate revolution as hoped. Libya - much worse. Panama - probably better.
We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated." As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.
Even beyond the job of seeing Iran no longer acting as a leading agent of chaos, I would greatly love to see their people liberated. Women in Iran who were just emerging into the 20th Century under the Shah's leadership have a chance to emerge from gender apartheid again, and I am 100% hoping to see this. (I wrote a while back about the utter lunacy of US women on the Left consistently siding with hardcore Islam and ignoring the plight of women in these countries).
Unfortunately for my optimism, I said the exact same thing, almost word for word, when we invaded Iraq. Iraq has since struggled to fulfill this promise, though to be fair a lot of the blame for that rests not on US failures or the Iraqis but on the ongoing efforts by Iran to subvert the country and keep it roiled in chaos. But getting there took a HUGE US commitment of money and lives, way more than a pushbutton decapitation of the leadership.
A parting thought -- there is clearly an Iranian opposition. We have seen them bravely marching in the streets (far braver than our anti-fascists here as they faced actual imprisonment and death for such protests against real fascists). This is an honest question -- around whom does the Iranian opposition rally and organize? As in many such authoritarian societies, only the authorities have organization. So even decapitated, the military and former government theoretically have a huge head start in pulling things together under their control in the aftermath than an unorganized populace. This is the same problem faced by many post-colonial governments. It's not that their populace wanted a military dictatorship when the colonizer left or was thrown out, but in many cases the only organized and educated group in the country was the military which stepped into the vacuum. I am not an expert on this but I have always assumed India escaped this fate because it had a relatively large, educated group of indigenous people trained in government and not in the military.
Postscript: I continue to find it sort of hilarious that media that go out of their way not to deadname a transexual teen insist on describing Iran as part of the Arab world and their citizens as Arabs. I can tell you with great confidence and many experiences that there is no way to piss off an Iranian faster than to call them an Arab.