Sorry to hog the thread. Time zones and all that :
Just watched RTE telly news. I can only get RTE player. ( Yes, I watch Fair City these days).
Seeing these celibrations over the death of Khamenei is great to see, but my thought is to put my cold hearted political thinking hat on. I am a lay person at politics, and my thought is, what are these folk, what are their politics, what do they want ? Do they want a different theocracy, a Monarchy, Communism, capitalism, democracy ?
Trump of course, he sees people dancing in the street and he takes the simplest view: "they love me blah blah". But he has no idea of the numbers.
I think the way to tackle authoritarian states is by example. Set an example of a rebuilt State working, and say, see what can happen.
With this idea, I reckon the world is blowing the chance of that already, because there is Syria, a near blank canvas, but a canvas with enough rips and tears that it would be a great demonstration of what CAN happen. And Syria also appears to have a decent guy... so far.
Get the Syrians together, the clerics, political scientists, bring in the communists, socialists, capitalists, theocrats, separatists etc, shut them all into a closed resort, total secrecy, and hammer out a couple of constitutions. Then publish the constitutions, have the masses debate them, then vote. I include clerics because really, who knows.
The secrecy is important, because it takes repercussions out. In private. a Chinese communist or an American Capitalist might say, " Actually. my system fails on this point". So they need protected.
Let the Syrians decide, based on honest frank discussions, advice and experience.
Then back them up as needed, to support what they vote for. Hopefully without the battles for influence.
And if, a big if, that works, then we can say, "This could be you". Here is a template.
But the way Trump is doing this? Nah.