There’s literally no on on planet Earth who thinks that the Ayatollah and that regime were a good thing. Okay, nobody outside of Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes and that crew of foreign policy people.

It’s possible, just possible, that they watched the calamity of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, with us killing our own soldiers, killing civilians, spending a trillion dollars, and accomplishing nothing but having another destabilized regime in the middle east, and said:

“Maybe there’s a different way.”

Along the way they might have noticed that Iran has three times the land mass of Iraq, and so would take even more boots on the ground the pacify, it has twice the population of Iraq so it would be harder to control them, it had an equivalently large army, funding from US adversaries and weaponry from Russia, and more to the point, actually better control of the population via its network of religious adherents throughout the country than Saddam ever did with his terror tactics.

So: given that we failed miserably in Iraq, against lesser assets, why would you stomp into Iran with a depleted and demoralized US force, trying the same game plan that has already resulted in national dishonor and impoverishment.

This is what we mean by “learning from experience” or “facing facts.” It’s like the lady on the jury I referenced upthread. Facts didn’t matter. She just “had a feeling.”