Would you have supported the 1979 Iranian Revolution?

[Dan the Roman]

With hindsight I would know the shah had 18 months to live and that was going to solve a whole lot of problems.

[Dan the Roman]

Almost everyone except the most hackish establishment reactionaries, in other words a specific sub-set of DeSantis/Haley folks would have supported the revolution, because one reason it succeeded is that the Shah had alienated almost everyone outside a very narrow strata of the court, security forces, and army. Even the air force and navy were wobbly.

With hindsight, almost no one here should for the simple reason that the Shah was going to drop dead within 18 months, and he would have been succeeded by a teenage son, with a European-educated woman as regent who while incompetent, dearly wanted to be popular in Western liberal circles. She would likely have allowed much freer elections on the level of say, Thailand. Combined with Iran's economic growth, the fact that the elite would have had little use for the teenage playboy Shah and the foreign empress, the transition to a developed democracy would have accelerated.

With hindsight, the Revolution was a catastrophe not just because of what followed, but because it was entirely unnecessary. At the time it was a near inevitability.

I would put the Russian Revolution in a similar category. Given Alexei's health, lack of development, and how hated Alexandra was by almost everyone, the "problem" such as it was, would have fixed itself, and at most required a single bullet. Not millions.