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The point is more that you can't get actual, willing obedience this way, all you can get is kayfabe. Any possible leader of Iran both doesn't like you much from the start, and will resent being under the cosh, so they will be reluctant servants at best and you can't actually slaughter them every year for that without looking (and being) somewhat insane.
So you have a choice: either you give orders from afar which are only carried out on the surface level, or you start putting Americans in the actually supervise these things at a low level. Accidents happen to those Americans - even if the top level don't want to get bombed b/c of dead Americans, they genuinely don't have the power or legitimacy to control idiots and murderers and rogue elements because they're considered pathetic poodles of the Great Satan. The more effort you make to protect your American observers and to help them fulfil their role, the more people hate and resent you, until the entire population becomes a distributed machine for lying to and fooling Americans.
Sometimes those top level guys get killed by their own people, and you have to replace them. This is what happened to the Shah for example. And eventually you may get revolution, and then you're back where you started, except that now you're bombing somewhat sympathetic freedom-fighters instead of fat ayatollahs.
This is the story of Britain in the ME, it's the story of Russian in the ME, and it's the story of America in the ME.
TLDR:
No, but this is now your problem because you want control over Iran not control over the 'leadership'.
I think you just want an Iran that you can keep supervised closely enough to not blow up their neighbors unexpectedly.
Since multiple other ME countries have been nominally brought 'into the fold' (I won't pretend this is a permanent thing) there must be some path to it.
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Actual, willing, obedience isn't necessary. If you pull off something like Venezuela and the new president is willing to play ball when it counts (not selling oil to Cuba and China seeming to be "what counts"), that's enough of a victory given the limited effort that was required to achieve it.
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You can dynamically align the interests of the local elite with yourself. The US and UK did this with large parts of the Middle East (not least the Gulf) already, and quite successfully.
Don’t kid yourself that these people are ideological zealots. Every few years there’s a scandal in Iran because senior IR regime figures are caught on vacation, wives unveiled, chilling in some vacation destination. The son of the ayatollah is a westernized property developer. There are a lot of people even at the top whose devotion to the revolutionary crusade is limited at best. The reason they didn’t concede wasn’t ideological zealotry but the knowledge that if the whole regime was overthrown, which is possible in a kind of Gorbachev-cascade, they’d have nowhere to hide from the people angry about 50 years of domestic repression.
That said, this will go badly because the most zealous anti-government protestors were killed months ago.
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