Even those regime supporters are civilians. This is literally advocating for a war crime.
The point of my comment was to give a first-hand conversation with an actual Iranian.
You can react to it any way you want, but the point of my comment was to show how some Iranians are actually thinking. And yes, many Iranians want regime change and they see the supporters of the regime as the enemy.
The regime hangs protestors by the way.
A casual conversation is not to be held to the rigour of legal or legislative opinion. But perspectives, like other sorts of opinions, are not all equal in value.
Some opinions are just noise and there is no value in "hearing all the perspectives" from sources that have no interest in even trying to think things through.
The worst opinions are calls to violence -- that lead to actual violence in some cases -- from people who incur zero risk from their extremism.
Idle statements about bombarding civilians, flattening countries, committing war crimes, "sending countries back into the Stone Age where they belong", are examples of arm-chair blather from people of whom the best we can say is that they have never lived under bombardment nor served in a time of conflict in any capacity whatsoever.
I quoted an actual conversation i had with an Iranian where they said essentially “go ahead and bomb the bridges”. That got flagged for some reason.
I’m simply trying to surface conversations I’ve had with Iranians. So often these Internet conversations occur in a bubble.
My point? I guess there’s this idea that Iranians are disgusted with Trump’s comment today. That hasn’t been my experience at all. My wife is Iranian. I’m connected to a large Iranian expat community. They are very pro Trump because of the war. The initial reaction I saw was disappointment with the ceasefire. They want continued pressure on the regime, and they feel that a cease-fire works against that.
All my in-laws are in Tehran: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody is anti-regime.
It’s hard for us to understand in the west. Speaking out against the regime is not possible.
These people who congregated on the bridges were phoned up by the regime as a marketing stunt. Perhaps they were family members or friends of the IRGC. Perhaps they were forced to go, because you can’t say no to the regime. They hang protesters.
I saw someone in another thread compare it to the USSR. Or maybe North Korea.
I’m not saying that there aren’t regime supporters, there definitely are. But you have to be very suspect whenever you see videos of “grassroots” supporters of the regime and remember that opposition voices are not allowed.
Indeed, the entitlement complex is probably why so many of them (in the iranian diaspora) were happy to rally behind an actual monarch.
This is not a normal thing to do for somebody who has supposedly adopted western values.
All military experts agree that bombing a country isn't going to trigger a regime change, and it hasn't so far after weeks of intense bombing. So the answer should be, keep bombing more things and target civilians?
Besides, the Iranian expat community is also a bubble, maybe not representative of the ones who are actually bombed.
I think about it this way: would I have had any problem with the allies bombing Nazi rallies, even though they were mostly civilians? My answer is absolutely not. I feel the same way when I see pro-Islamic regime or pro-Hezbollah rallies. In fact, I think the limited repercussions for these extremist civilians - and their very tangible support for the regimes - is what keeps these movements alive and powerful. Cost to civilizations - military and civilian alike - is what ends wars.
I don't think holding such views is helpful.
Besides, a few people have been prosecuted for war crimes while being on the winning side (or by their own side), some examples:
William Calley (US), convicted for his role in the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians.
Donald Payne (UK), for abuse and death of an Iraqi detainee.
Charles Graner (US), sentenced to 10 years in prison for the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
However, we can agree those are very few and far between, compared to all crimes committed. But it's more useful to condemn them and advocate for more accountability than to claim it's useless anyways and normalize calls for more crimes.