The internal conflict over corruption, water issues and handling of the protesters had a decent chance to cause meaningful changes in government. Starting a war and attacking their civilians put those chances to bed.

Strategically, it makes no sense to corner and threaten people. Murdering their own citizens shows the degree to which they'll go to preserve their power. If anything, that's a reason to slowly bleed them instead of cornering and escalating.

The evil of your enemy does not excuse your own strategic stupidity or cruelty.

And that gives US people the right to go there and murder a few thousand extra people?

How does that compare with putting hundreds of thousands of people into cages for arbitrary reasons, I wonder. Or depositing them in random countries to be killed because they are e.g. homosexual.

Allegedly, according to the same political factions that aggressively bombed Iran just weeks later.

Considering theyre now doing airstrikes, there was 100% pre-invasion action that included agitating these protests. Like they're literally bombing them now but we think we werent already doing CIA activity there 6 months ago? Im not saying civilians love the government they probably hate it but... its complicated, what if the person rallying and pushing 1000 people was actually a deep cover agent

Before I get downvoted to hell Im not conding anything or taking any side, just pointing out an obvious deduction

You're being disingenuous - the "protestor" was caught on camera literally hacking a policeman to pieces. He murdered a policeman, and will now be executed.