> Would that have caused any more than a bit of delay? Or even that? I
> hadn't realized the guards were based in a particular place and could be
> intercepted so. I thought they were pretty well intermixed such that air
> strikes would only cause indiscriminate mayhem.
There are many Revolutionary Guards bases. While there are some in various cities, there were not enough RGs in Teheran, for example, to contain riots/demonstrations in Teheran, where the opposition was particularly strong, so RGs would have had to have been moved from other cities. It is those movements that the US could have hit. Also, in 2003, the RG unit in Teheran didn't have many tanks (I suspect the ayatollahs didn't fully trust that unit, since it would have had to fire on friends, relatives and neighbors), so the tanks would definitely have had to have been moved, nice big, fat, slow-moving, readily identifiable targets. I don't know about now; I haven't really kept up on the disposition of RG armor. It is still true that the RGs are generally not adequate for dealing with full-scale demonstrations in any particular city, especially if the army stays on the sidelines. If army units actually join the demonstrators, it would take a full-scale RG deployment to put down that revolt.
> I was thinking a few years farther back than that, which allowed me to
> count the Turks as the aggressors. That is, the Greeks on Cyprus would not
> have been interested in annexation to Greece had it not been for their
> being victims of oppression at the hands of the local Turks during the
> previous decade. Not continuously, though, so it's not as strong a case as
> might've been.
I'm not that up on Cypriot history. However, since the Greeks outnumber the Turks, how were the Turks able to oppress the Greeks? Wasn't the Cypriot govt. "always" in Gk hands? BTW, it is entirely possible that a strongly nationalist group - as was the case in 1974 - might want to join Greece even in the absence of recent problems, especially given the 500+-year history of Gk-Turk animosity.
Doug
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