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Posted on 04/13/2026 6:28:33 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
With a little more than an hour to go before President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to open up a vital shipping corridor, Utah businessman Khosrow Semnani, who was born in the Middle East country, was wracked with anxiety.
“I’ve never been worried so badly as I am right now, to be honest with you,” he said.
Semnani, the man who opened Tooele County’s low-level nuclear waste facility, was particularly concerned about Trump’s threats to attack bridges and power plants in Iran, especially the nuclear generation facility in Bushehr.
“These are counterproductive. It pushes people of Iran to go to the regime as their own savior,” Semnani said. “That’s not what [American officials] want.”
Utah’s Iranian community has been watching the conflict closely since it began. About 1,600 people in the Beehive State have Iranian ancestry, according to a 2024 population estimate. At least one nonprofit group, Iranians of Utah, caters to the community.
Semnani said most Iranian Americans in Utah oppose the clerical regime that came to power in the country after the 1979 revolution. He has spoken with American and European politicians about the Iranian government since 1981.
He still believes that the regime is “illegal, dictatorial and corrupt,” even as he is concerned about how the U.S. is wielding its air power in the conflict
Arash Bakhshandehpour’s feelings are similarly conflicted and complicated. At the outset of the war, he welcomed the attacks and cheered when Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an American airstrike.
“We wanted regime change,” Bakhshandehpour said. “... However, what it takes for that to occur, the amount of civilian casualties and also cultural impact and cultural loss is really concerning.”
He argued that Trump’s threats to Iranian civilization should be targeted at the regime instead..
(Excerpt) Read more at sltrib.com ...
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You post threads and don’t post why you are, or anything about your personal opinion?
“especially the nuclear generation facility in Bushehr”
Nuclear power plants produce plutonium which can be used to make a bomb in North Korean fashion.
It’s healthy to know how non-official, average people perceive the current situation and why.
It’s clear Iranians both inside and outside of the country want the regime gone but the deathly impact of the war plus the lack of unity on the democracy/opposition side complicates that goal. So it’s understandable that there hasn’t been some mass uprising.
Also: given what happened during protests earlier, people don’t want to get killed. Families lost fathers and their primary providers in the protests, many young people died too…
No easy solutions.
Why are you posting stuff that the murdering,torturing IRI would applaud?
“You post threads and don’t post why you are, or anything about your personal opinion?”
I agree. It is a cowardly way to post what is a controversial article on this forum.
They are right to be worried.
If Iran does not tap out, and if we’re serious about ending this under our terms, if these negations fail, the next step is to start bombing targets that will seriously affect the people of Iran: electrical power, water generation, transportation, non-war related industry, non-war related government bureaucracy.
War isn’t pretty.
It never is, even if an Obama or Biden start it and the MSM slobbers all over this war as they did in Ukraine, or Syria, or Libya... In Syria we were backing HTS, an AQ inspired group that was on our terrorist watch list, and out MSM hardly covered it! Our MSM was probably still recovering from that thrill running up their leg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y8AxjJJOuQ
The only difference now, is that with a Republican in office, a Trump who the MSM and social media despise, they will suddenly find their investigative, watch dog, both sides of the story, non-censoring, humanitarian angle in how they present the “news.” I’m waiting for the story of how the war in Iran is contributing to climate change (LOL/sarc)!
In World War 2 the US learned that civilian populations, not their leadership, fight wars. You can’t defeat a country without ending its civilization. It’s a fact. Get used to it.
I am worried that my children and grandchildren might have to face an Iran with nuclear weapons and the missile capability to send them all over the world. Is any one else worried about that?
“Bakhshandehpour said. “... However, what it takes for that to occur, the amount of civilian casualties and also cultural impact and cultural loss is really concerning.””
So Bakehdehpour is more concerned now than when the Iranian government was killing 30,000+ in the streets in the last few months?
As Franklin Graham informed Piers Morgan last week:
Iran has the fastest growing church in the world. The Christians are praying hard and we will see how God moves on their behalf.
https://persecution.org/2023/07/20/the-worlds-fastest-growing-church/
You post threads and make individual posts, yet say so little, you stay evasive, weak, and lukewarm, clearly you are on a personal mission but are afraid and too weak to promote it openly or even define it.
Of course, I forget the most important target of them all: their oil industry.
If we do not come to an agreement, and we want to reduce Iran, we need to take away the regime’s financial means. Roughly 30% of Iran’s total government budget comes from oil revenue and taking that away will hurt them in a serious way.
The beauty is that going after their oil will be extremely easy.
Oil refineries, pipelines, wells and storage facilities are well known in location, easy to destroy (not hardened), impossible to move, easy to do battle damage assessment on, they are centralized and you don’t have a huge number of targets, difficult / costly / and take a long time to rebuild, and almost impossible to effectively defend with air defense. Taking out Iran’s income and going after their oil will be super easy and quick.
In a matter of days, we can take away 24% of Iran’s national GDP, >30% of their national governments budget, and 80% of their governments export revenues! To put this in context, the Great Depression saw the economy shrink by 29% GDP.
The problem is, up until now, we were going after targets that insulate the average Iranian from this war. It’s a battle between the regime and the US. What comes next will impact the average Iranian as we take out their economy and degrade their infrastructure.
However, our MSM can talk all the crap they want, the Iranian regime can talk all the crap they want and pretend they won, if we wipe out their economy and infrastructure nationally, Iran becomes irrelevant.
They will be like the Black Knight from Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs
It’s hard to build nuclear weapons, thousands of drones and missiles, bunkers, and rebuild an IADS without most importantly money (the Russians and Chinese are not in the business of giving things away for free in mass quantities). When you reduce Iran to the point where water and electrical power are scarce, where you can’t easily move between cities within Iran, where the government has a hard time just doing its basic functions, trying to pay for and send Quds forces in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon becomes difficult.
In the big picture, EVERYONE in Iran is part of the system. You don’t want to hurt the average civilian, but if the regime does not tap out, you are stuck reducing them to a point where you end up hurting the average civilian even if you do not directly target them. If you’re unwilling to go to that level to win, you may as well get rid of your military (every despot essentially can use their own population as a shield), and you should apologize for WWII to the Japanese and Germans (which some modern-day liberals actually believe) since we applied a “total war” theory there.
I do not think it is necessary to reduce Iran like we did Japan or Germany in WWII. Today with intel, modern guidance systems, specialized munitions, an elaborate targeting process, we can get to the desired effect WITHOUT doing what we did in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Bremen, the Ruhr, Dresden (that was inspired by the British, Harris), or Berlin. But nonetheless, the civilian population will still suffer.
Iran is more likely to become a Shinto theocracy than it is a democracy.
You don’t have any integrity or honesty, you keep posting me PMs expressing more detail of your views but you refuse to post them on any threads, yet it is you cherry picking articles from around the globe to post as threads on FR.
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