Killing Netanyahu wouldn’t be great self defense, on the contrary. What Iran and Iran-controlled factions are doing now is the better “self defense” violence: target assets that have a deep value for the US and their allies.

I didn't say violence was always wrong. I said it was always the result of failure. There are of course plenty of times when violence is justified.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that the country that was bombed literally murdered forty thousand protesters in the past month. To put that in perspective, the total number of protesters deaths in Minneapolis is under ten, and that's a hugely tragic situation. And the leaders who ordered those forty thousand people murdered are the ones who were just blown up in that bomb strike.

And I'm still saying the bombing in Iran was a bad thing.

If the goal was regime change (which is a noble pursuit here in the same way it would be a noble pursuit to work to unseat Netanyahu), Iran was already well on its way to that, and there are dozens of things the US could have done to push for that without escalating to a full scale kinetic war. The bombing, if anything, is regressive to those goals.

And to your final point, yes, there comes a time when a situation has deteriorated to the point that there is some actor that is an existential threat to one or more people groups and the only mechanism to stop them is violence. There's an argument that literally either side of this conflict represents one of those existential threats. But I'm unconvinced that any have progressed past the point of intervention via non-violent means.

Which is why I asked earlier "why is it a good idea to bomb Israel," as so far the best answer I've gotten is "because Israel is bad," which isn't a reason. If that's the standard, I've got a list of about 20 countries to give you that were gonna have to bomb as well. If it's "we need to bomb countries that are conducting genocide," then there's a list of about half that we need to be actively bombing.

Genocide is bad and needs to be stopped. That goes without saying, obviously. But the answer isn't just "have the US bomb every country that's perpetrating a genocide." It turns out that that will often do more harm than good, and sometimes there are more effective "non-bomb" solutions that will do much more in the long run. Even if "bombing the bad people makes the lizard brain feel good."