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I really don't understand why, if Trump was considering attacking, he didn't do so when the protests were closer to their peak and he threatened intervention if people got shot.
I've seen attempts to praise Trump for holding to his red lines, unlike a certain other President, but what good is it if you dither long enough that it doesn't matter? It was always a long shot that you could stop this stuff from the air (we apparently have to go through cyclical phases of optimism about regime change/victory via air power) but same goes for collapsing this regime.
The US military makes things look very easy, but that's due to a lot of battlespace preparation, asset mobilization, and logistics. The downside is that it's very easy to make this look so easy as to think they could accomplish it on a shorter time scale.
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I have heard rumors that the planned uprising was going to be concurrent with the strikes, but that it was discovered and had to go early.
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Because carriers don't move fast enough. I don't think it matters. Against a sufficiently ruthless regime, unarmed protestors are just bullet sponges, and that holds true even if the regime is being bombed. I think some Iranians in the west have gotten this idea that "you protest, things change" is actually cause-and-effect from watching western leftists appear to pull it off; they don't realize that's kayfabe, either a way for the government to do what it wants to do anyway, or at least a faction of the government.
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